Vorticity from isocurvature in the early universe

Abstract: Vorticity is ubiquitous in nature however, to date, studies of vorticity in cosmology and the early universe have been quite rare. In this paper, based on a talk in session CM1 of the 13th Marcel Grossmann Meeting, we consider vorticity generation from scalar cosmological perturbations of a perfect fluid system. We show that, at second order in perturbation theory, vorticity is sourced by a coupling between energy density and entropy gradients, thus extending a well-known feature of classical fluid dynamics to a relativistic cosmological framework. This induced vorticity, sourced by isocurvature perturbations, may prove useful in the future as an additional discriminator between inflationary models.