Gravitational lensing on the Cosmic Microwave Background by gravity waves

Abstract

We study the effect of a stochastic background of gravitational waves on the gravitational lensing of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation. It has been shown that matter density inhomogeneities produce a smoothing of the acoustic peaks in the angular power spectrum of the CMB anisotropies. A gravitational wave background gives rise to an additional smoothing of the spectrum. For the most simple case of a gravitational wave background arising during a period of inflation, the effect results to be three to four orders of magnitude smaller than its scalar counterpart, and is thus undetectable. It could play a more relevant role in models where a larger background of gravitational waves is produced.

6 pages, RevTeX file, 1 figure

References in corpus (2)

• Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropies from second order gravitational perturbations
• The Effect of Weak Gravitational Lensing on the Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropy: Flat versus Open Universes

Cited by in corpus (4)

• CMB polarization from secondary vector and tensor modes
• Rotation of the cosmic microwave background polarization from weak gravitational lensing
• Primordial gravitational waves and the collapse of the wave function
• Constraining stochastic gravitational wave background from weak lensing of CMB B-modes