On the Transverse-Traceless Projection in Lattice Simulations of
  Gravitational Wave Production
  It has recently been pointed out that the usual procedure employed in order
to obtain the transverse-traceless (TT) part of metric perturbations in lattice
simulations was inconsistent with the fact that those fields live in the
lattice and not in the continuum. It was claimed that this could lead to a
larger amplitude and a wrong shape for the gravitational wave (GW) spectra
obtained in numerical simulations of (p)reheating. In order to address this
issue, we have defined a consistent prescription in the lattice for extracting
the TT part of the metric perturbations. We demonstrate explicitly that the GW
spectra obtained with the old continuum-based TT projection only differ
marginally in amplitude and shape with respect to the new lattice-based ones.
We conclude that one can therefore trust the predictions appearing in the
literature on the spectra of GW produced during (p)reheating and similar
scenarios simulated on a lattice.
