Quantized gravitational wave perturbations in Robertson-Walker universes

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Abstract
We consider the theory of quantized gravitational wave perturbations in the three types of Robertson-Walker universes. In a gauge analogous to the Coulomb gauge in electrodynamics it is possible to identify and quantize the independent degrees of freedom of the graviton field. The resulting theory is equivalent to that for a pair of massless, minimally coupled scalar fields in the same background space-time. As an application of the formalism, we calculate the spectrum of gravitons produced by a power-law expansion of the universe and show that it has no divergences.