Scalar-induced gravitational waves from a box-shaped curvature power spectrum
Abstract
We compute the stochastic background of gravitational waves (GWs) produced at second order in cosmological perturbation theory by a primordial curvature power spectrum that is flat in over a finite band and vanishes elsewhere. This logarithmic box interpolates between a monochromatic spectrum as and a locally scale-invariant plateau as , and its sharp boundaries make the geometry of the source convolution unusually transparent. Working in the radiation era, we reduce the convolution to a compact integral over the overlap between the momentum triangle and the box, and evaluate it analytically in two regimes. For a narrow box we show that, to leading order in the width, the spectrum equals the Dirac-spectrum result multiplied by a purely geometric overlap factor ; this factor turns the infrared slope from into at a break . For a broad box we separate the lower edge, the scale-invariant interior, and the upper edge, derive the leading behaviour in each (an infrared rise, a scale-invariant plateau, and a quartic cut-off at the hard endpoint ), and combine them into a single uniform formula cast as a product of two universal, -independent edge functions. We also provide an integral-free closed-form surrogate for these edge functions for use in parameter scans.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2607.10730,
title = {Scalar-induced gravitational waves from a box-shaped curvature power spectrum},
author = {Zu-Cheng Chen and Lang Liu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.10730},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
30 pages, 4 figures