Relic gravitons from stiff curvature perturbations

The tensor modes reentering the Hubble radius when the plasma is dominated by a stiff fluid lead to a spectral energy density whose blue slope depends on the total post-inflationary sound speed. This result gets however corrected by a secondary (gauge-dependent) term coming from the curvature inhomogeneities that reenter all along the same stage of expansion. In comparison with the first-order result, the secondary contribution is shown to be always suppressed inside the sound horizon and its effect on the total spectral energy density of the relic gravitons is therefore negligible for all phenomenological purposes. It is also suggested that the effective anisotropic stress of the curvature inhomogeneities can be obtained from the functional derivative of the second-order action of curvature inhomogeneities with respect to the background metric. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V.