English

The Weyl tensor correlator in cosmological spacetimes

High Energy Physics - Theory 2014-12-09 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

We give a general expression for the Weyl tensor two-point function in a general Friedmann-Lema\^itre-Robertson-Walker spacetime. We work in reduced phase space for the perturbations, i.e., quantize only the dynamical degrees of freedom without adding any gauge-fixing term. The general formula is illustrated by a calculation in slow-roll single-field inflation to first order in the slow-roll parameters ϵ\epsilon and δ\delta, and the result is shown to have the correct de Sitter limit as ϵ,δ0\epsilon, \delta \to 0. Furthermore, it is seen that the Weyl tensor correlation function does not suffer from infrared divergences, unlike the two-point functions of the metric and scalar field perturbations. Lastly, we show how to recover the usual tensor power spectrum from the Weyl tensor correlation function.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1409.7964,
  title  = {The Weyl tensor correlator in cosmological spacetimes},
  author = {Markus B. Fröb},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1409.7964},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

26 pages, 0 figures, matches published version

R2 v1 2026-06-22T06:07:52.713Z