An analytic description of the damping of gravitational waves by free streaming neutrinos

Abstract

We provide an analytic solution to the general wavelength integro-differential equation describing the damping of tensor modes of gravitational waves due to free streaming neutrinos in the early universe. Our result is expressed as a series of spherical Bessel functions whose coefficients are functions of the reduced wave number $Q$.

Comments: 14 pages, 2 figures, revisions, additional references