Intrinsic bispectrum of the scalar-induced gravitational waves

Recent pulsar timing array collaborations have reported evidence of the stochastic gravitational wave background. The gravitational waves induced by primordial curvature perturbations, referred to as scalar-induced gravitational waves (SIGWs), could potentially be the physical origins of this gravitational wave background. In addition to the statistical properties of SIGWs derived from the primordial fluctuations, SIGWs also have intrinsic non-Gaussianity originating from the non-linear interactions of Einstein's gravity, which, however, is rarely explored. In this paper, we study the intrinsic non-Gaussianity of SIGWs with the bispectrum and the skewness under the assumption of the Gaussian primordial curvature perturbations, phenomenologically modeled as a lognormal spectrum. The bispectrum is shown to be vanishing in the collinear limit, which is independent of the initial conditions and the dynamics of SIGWs. For the SIGWs generated during the radiation-dominated era, the bispectrum is of flatten-type non-Gaussianity, with only four polarization components left to be non-vanishing. Additionally, in order to obtain the correct bispectrum, we also propose a time-oscillation average scheme and a regularization scheme. Utilizing the skewness for quantifying the degree of non-Gaussianity, it is found that the curvature power spectrum with a narrow width can result in an enhancement of the third-order non-Gaussianity. The conclusion holds for both the SIGWs generated in the radiation-dominated era and the matter-dominated era.
Comment: 31 pages, 11 figures