Necessity of spacetime shear for cosmological gravitational waves

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that shear-free perturbations in homogeneous and isotropic universes do not produce gravitational waves, highlighting the essential role of shear in generating cosmological gravitational waves.

Contribution

It proves that shear-free perturbations are necessarily silent and cannot generate gravitational waves, emphasizing the importance of shear in cosmological wave production.

Findings

Shear-free perturbations are acceleration-free and map onto geodesic flows.

Magnetic part of Weyl tensor has no tensor modes in shear-free perturbations.

Electric modes oscillate homogeneously without wave propagation.

Abstract

We show that a general but shear-free perturbation of homogeneous and isotropic universes are necessarily silent, without any gravitational waves. We prove this in two steps. First we establish that a shear free perturbation of these universes are acceleration-free and the fluid flow geodesics of the background universe maps onto themselves in the perturbed universe. This effect then decouples the evolution equations of the electric and magnetic parts of the Weyl tensor in the perturbed spacetimes and the magnetic part no longer contains any tensor modes. Although the electric part, that drives the tidal forces, do have tensor modes sourced by the anisotropic stress, these modes have homogeneous oscillations at every point on a time slice without any wave propagation. We also show the presence of vorticity vector waves that are sourced by the curl of heat flux. This analysis shows the critical role of the shear tensor in generating cosmological gravitational waves in an expanding universe.