The Weyl tensor correlator in cosmological spacetimes

الأصل · EN

We give a general expression for the Weyl tensor two-point function in a general Friedmann-Lemaître-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 and δ, and the result is shown to have the correct de Sitter limit as ε, δ→ 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.