Production of primordial gravitational waves in teleparallel gravity

Abstract

We study the production of primordial gravitational waves in the context of extended teleparallel gravity models and compare them with those of general relativity. Teleparallel gravity has been widely studied in the context of the late universe but not much in the early universe. Two sources of primordial gravitational waves are considered, vacuum fluctuations and tensor anisotropies within two inflation-compatible backgrounds: a perfect de Sitter and a quasi de Sitter background. We find that in the vacuum case with a perfect de Sitter background, the gravitational waves propagation equation is the same as that of general relativity, however, if the background is promoted to a quasi de Sitter background, the propagation equations are different resulting in an important difference on the tensor spectral index. When tensor anisotropies are included, we compute the most general solution for gravitational waves in terms of a retarded Green’s function and analyze the contributions to the power spectrum from these anisotropies. Finally, we investigate the energy density of these gravitational waves.