Cosmic shear from scalar-induced gravitational waves

Weak gravitational lensing by foreground density perturbations generates a gradient mode in the shear of background images. In contrast, cosmological tensor perturbations induce a nonzero curl mode associated with image rotations. In this note, we study the lensing signatures of both primordial gravitational waves from inflation and second-order gravitational waves generated from the observed spectrum of primordial density fluctuations. We derive the curl mode for galaxy lensing surveys at redshifts of 1–3 and for lensing of the cosmic microwave background at a redshift of 1100. We find that the curl mode angular power spectrum associated with secondary tensor modes for galaxy lensing surveys dominates over the corresponding signal generated by primary gravitational waves from inflation. However, both tensor contributions to the shear curl mode spectrum are below the projected noise levels of upcoming galaxy and cosmic microwave background lensing surveys and therefore are unlikely to be detectable.