Effect of a viscous fluid shell on the propagation of gravitational waves

TL;DR

This paper investigates how viscous fluids can significantly dampen gravitational waves, especially in astrophysical events like supernovae and early universe scenarios, revealing conditions for near-complete wave attenuation.

Contribution

It introduces a new model for gravitational wave damping in viscous fluids, extending previous dust shell analyses to include shear viscosity effects and astrophysical applications.

Findings

Damping increases when wavelength is much larger than the shell radius.

Significant damping occurs in most supernova models, sometimes nearly complete.

Viscous damping can prevent detection of primordial gravitational waves.

Abstract

In this paper we show that there are circumstances in which the damping of gravitational waves (GWs) propagating through a viscous fluid can be highly significant; in particular, this applies to Core Collapse Supernovae (CCSNe). In previous work, we used linearized perturbations on a fixed background within the Bondi-Sachs formalism, to determine the effect of a dust shell on GW propagation. Here, we start with the (previously found) velocity field of the matter, and use it to determine the shear tensor of the fluid flow. Then, for a viscous fluid, the energy dissipated is calculated, leading to an equation for GW damping. It is found that the damping effect agrees with previous results when the wavelength $\lambda$ is much smaller than the radius $r_i$ of the matter shell; but if $\lambda\gg r_i$, then the damping effect is greatly increased. Next, the paper discusses an astrophysical application, CCSNe. There are several different physical processes that generate GWs, and many models have been presented in the literature. The damping effect thus needs to be evaluated with each of the parameters $\lambda,r_i$ and the coefficient of shear viscosity $\eta$, having a range of values. It is found that in most cases there will be significant damping, and in some cases that it is almost complete. We also consider the effect of viscous damping on primordial gravitational waves (pGWs) generated during inflation in the early Universe. Two cases are investigated where the wavelength is either much shorter than the shell radii or much longer; we find that there are conditions that will produce significant damping, to the extent that the waves would not be detectable.