Multiscale cosmological dynamics

The recently developed mean field theory of relativistic gravitation predicts the emergence of an “apparent matter” field at large scales describing the net effect of small-scale fluctuations on the large-scale dynamics of the universe. It is found that this so-called back reaction effect is much stronger for gravitational waves than for matter density fluctuations. At large scales, gravitational waves behave like radiation and, for them, the perturbative effect scales as the squared relative amplitude times squared frequency. In particular, a bath of gravitational waves of relative amplitude 10−5 and frequency would not be directly detectable by today’s technology but would generate an effective large-scale radiation of amplitude comparable to the unperturbed matter density of the universe.