Nonlinear Phenomena in Complex Systems, 2014, Vol.17, No.4, pp.352-354

NONLINEAR PHENOMENA IN COMPLEX SYSTEMS
An Interdisciplinary Journal

2014, Vol.17, No.4, pp.352-354

Cosmological Perturbations and the Weyl Tensor
E. Bittencourt, J. Salim and G. B. dos Santos

In a previous work the authors have solved the Einstein equations of General Relativity for a class of metrics with constant spatial curvature where it was found a non vanishing Weyl tensor due to the presence of an anisotropic pressure component associated to a primordial magnetic field. Here, we perform the perturbative analysis of this model in order to study the gravitational stability under linear scalar perturbations. For this purpose, we take the Quasi-Maxwellian formalism of General Relativity as our framework, which offers a naturally covariant and gauge-invariant approach to deal with perturbations that are directly linked to observational quantities. We also consider a generalization of the causal thermodynamics to include the effect of the non-null Weyl tensor by introducing a new “viscosity” term.

Key words: cosmological perturbation theory, primordial magnetic fields, physics of the early universe

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