Cosmological perturbations: a new gauge-invariant approach

A new gauge-invariant approach for describing cosmological perturbations is developed. It is based on a physically motivated splitting of the stress-energy tensor of the perturbation into two parts—the bare perturbation and the complementary perturbation associated with stresses in the background gravitational field induced by the introduction of the bare perturbation. The complementary perturbation of the stress-energy tensor is explicitly singled out and taken to the left side of the perturbed Einstein equations so that the bare stress-energy tensor is the sole source for the perturbation of the metric tensor and both sides of these equations are gauge invariant with respect to infinitesimal coordinate transformations. For simplicity we analyze the perturbations of the spatially-flat Friedmann–Lemaı̂tre–Robertson–Walker (FLRW) dust model. A cosmological gauge can be chosen such that the equations for the perturbations of the metric tensor are completely decoupled for the h₀₀, h_0i, and h_ij metric components and explicitly solvable in terms of retarded integrals.