Anisotropy of the astrophysical gravitational wave background: Analytic expression of the angular power spectrum and correlation with cosmological observations

Abstract

Unresolved sources of gravitational waves are at the origin of a stochastic gravitational wave background. While the computation of its mean density as a function of frequency in a homogeneous and isotropic universe is standard lore, the computation of its anisotropies requires understanding the coarse graining from local systems, to galactic scales and then to cosmology. An expression of the gravitational wave energy density valid in any general spacetime is derived. It is then specialized to a perturbed Friedmann-Lema\^{\i}tre spacetime in order to determine the angular power spectrum of this stochastic background as well as its correlation with other cosmological probes, such as the galaxy number counts and weak lensing. Our result for the angular power spectrum also provides an expression for the variance of the gravitational wave background.