Damping of Tensor Modes in Cosmology

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  • 16 June 2003
Abstract
An analytic formula is given for the traceless transverse part of the anisotropic stress tensor due to free streaming neutrinos, and used to derive an integro-differential equation for the propagation of cosmological gravitational waves. The solution shows that this interaction reduces the squared amplitude by a factor 0.644 for wavelengths that enter the horizon during the radiation-dominated phase, independent of any cosmological parameters. The effect is smaller for wavelengths that enter the horizon during the matter- dominated phase, and disappears in polarization measurements for wavelengths that had not yet entered the horizon at the time of last scattering.

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