Solution
ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2006/iii/paper-62/4/c/solution
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2006 iii Paper 62 4 c Solution by
Codex 0 Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
With negligible cold-dark-matter velocity, the synchronous perfect-fluid density equation gives . Differentiate and use the trace Einstein equation, taking the cold matter sound speed to vanish and its density to dominate:In a spatially flat matter-dominated universe, , , and the conformal Friedmann equation gives . HencePut . The indicial equation is . These two independent modes span the solution space, soEquivalently the growing mode is proportional to and the decaying mode to . The coefficients are set by initial data. Since synchronous gauge has residual coordinate modes, interpreting the density contrast physically requires fixing its residual freedom consistently, for example by the cold-matter rest frame and metric tensor integration convention; the mode equation alone is not a gauge-invariant observable.
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