Lanczos potentials and a definition of gravitational entropy for perturbed FLRW space-times

Abstract

We give a prescription for constructing a Lanczos potential for a cosmological model which is a purely gravitational perturbation of a Friedman-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker space-time. For the radiation equation of state, we find the Lanczos potential explicitly via Fourier transforms. As an application, we follow up a suggestion of Penrose and propose a definition of gravitational entropy for these cosmologies. With this definition, the gravitational entropy initially is finite if and only if the initial Weyl tensor is finite.