David H. Lyth 2026-11-05
David H. Lyth helped establish when large-scale cosmological curvature is conserved. With David Wands, Karim A. Malik and Andrew R. Liddle, he showed that negligible non-adiabatic pressure perturbations preserve the uniform-density curvature perturbation when spatial-gradient effects are negligible.[ref]
The result specifies when primordial fluctuations can be carried forward without solving every intervening gravitational detail.
David Wands 2026-11-05
David Wands and collaborators gave a conservation-based account of long-wavelength fluctuations in linear cosmological perturbation theory. Their 2000 work treated slowly varying regions as locally homogeneous expanding universes and identified the conditions for conserved uniform-density curvature perturbations, without selecting particular gravitational field equations.[ref]
The important qualifications are negligible spatial gradients and negligible non-adiabatic pressure perturbations; large wavelength alone is insufficient.