The Imprint of Gravitational Waves in Models Dominated by a Dynamical Cosmic Scalar Field
Abstract
An alternative to the standard cold dark matter model has been recently proposed in which a significant fraction of the energy density of the universe is due to a dynamical scalar field (
Q
) whose effective equation-of-state differs from that of matter, radiation or cosmological constant (
Λ
). In this paper, we determine how the Q-component modifies the primordial inflation gravitational wave (tensor metric) contribution to the cosmic microwave background anisotropy and, thereby, one of the key tests of inflation.