General cosmological perturbations in teleparallel gravity

Abstract

We discuss linear perturbations of the most general class of teleparallel spacetimes with cosmological symmetry, and perform a decomposition of these perturbations into irreducible components. We then study their behavior under gauge transformations, i.e., infinitesimal diffeomorphisms of the background spacetime, and derive a full set of gauge-invariant perturbation variables. Comparing our results with perturbations around the diagonal tetrad corresponding to a spatially flat teleparallel background cosmology, we see the appearance of new terms which depend on the particular choice of a cosmologically symmetric background tetrad. Finally, we demonstrate the application of our findings to teleparallel gravity theories. For convenience, results are displayed both in general and conformal coordinates.