Recent results from the BICEP2 experiment have produced a lot of talk about the primordial gravitational waves produced during the inflationary period.
I would like to have some explanation about how inflationary models predict the generation of these gravitational waves. Have these gravitational waves been described as metric perturbations around a de Sitter spacetime? Are they predicted using a semiclassical gravity formalism so as to take into account the quantization of a scalar field (the inflaton) in such "perturbed" spacetime?
