Adiabatic mode

An adiabatic mode is a long-wavelength physical perturbation whose leading local field configuration is generated by a residual gauge transformation. Its action on shorter modes produces a cosmological soft theorem or consistency relation.

An adiabatic perturbation obeys ${\Delta }_r=(4/3){\Delta }_c$. In a radiation background this makes the cold-matter density equation ${\Delta }_c^{\prime \prime }+{\Delta }_c^{\prime }/\tau =4{\Delta }_c/{\tau }^2$, whose growing solution is ${\tau }^2$. In a matter background it instead becomes ${\Delta }_c^{\prime \prime }+2{\Delta }_c^{\prime }/\tau =6{\Delta }_c/{\tau }^2$, with the same growing conformal-time exponent and a different scale-factor dependence.