Adiabatic or Non-Adiabatic? Unraveling the Nature of Initial Conditions in the Cosmological Gravitational Wave Background

Abstract

The non-thermal nature of the cosmological gravitational wave background (CGWB) makes it difficult to define the initial condition for the graviton distribution, which determines the initial contribution to the CGWB anisotropies. Specifically, unlike Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) photons, primordial gravitational waves (GWs) are not necessarily subject to adiabatic initial conditions. For the CGWB generated by quantum fluctuations of the metric during inflation the initial conditions are not adiabatic. The violation of adiabaticity arises from the presence of independent tensor perturbations during inflation, which behave as two extra fields that affect the standard single-clock argument. The non-adiabatic initial contribution enhances the total CGWB angular power spectrum compared to the standard adiabatic case. Given the high degree of correlation between the CGWB and Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies, we present the constrained realization maps of the CGWB built using the high-resolution CMB Planck maps for different initial conditions.