Modeling Background Radiation in Isotropic Cosmologies

Abstract

Using explicit perturbations of isotropic cosmological models which describe simple gravitational waves, an isotropic tensor having the algebraic symmetries of the Bel-Robinson tensor is derived as a model of cosmic background gravitational radiation and this is used to provide an answer to the question: in what sense can an energy-momentum-stress tensor similar to that describing the cosmic microwave background radiation (neglecting anisotropies) be associated with an isotropic background of gravitational radiation?