Temperature fluctuations in an inhomogeneous diffusive fluid

Abstract

We discuss metric perturbations of the relativistic diffusion equation around the homogeneous Juttner equilibrium of massless particles in a homogeneous expanding universe. The metric perturbation describes matter distribution and the gravitational wave background in an inhomogeneous universe. We show that the lowest order perturbation can be treated as a variation of temperature. We derive a formula expressing temperature fluctuations in terms of the diffusion and tensor power spectrum. We discuss the multipole expansion of the fluctuations in the presence of diffusion.