GW_CLASS: Cosmological Gravitational Wave Background in the Cosmic Linear Anisotropy Solving System

Abstract

The anisotropies of the Cosmological Gravitational Wave Background (CGWB) retain information about the primordial mechanisms that source the gravitational waves and about the geometry and the particle content of the universe at early times. In this work, we discuss in detail the computation of the angular power spectra of CGWB anisotropies and of their cross correlation with Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies, assuming different processes for the generation of these primordial signals. We present an efficient implementation of our results in a modified version of CLASS which will be publicly available. By combining our new code GW_CLASS with MontePython, we forecast the combined sensitivity of future gravitational wave interferometers and CMB experiments to the cosmological parameters that characterize the cosmological gravitational wave background.Comment: 64 pages, 16 figures. V2 matches the version published by JCAP. GW_CLASS is publicly available on the class_public git repository as a branch GW_CLASS, https://github.com/lesgourg/class_public/tree/GW_CLASS (For details on installation and usage, follow the instructions in the README.