Primordial gravitational waves are created during the de Sitter phase of an exponentially-expanding ( inflationary ) universe , due to quantum zero-point vacuum fluctuations .
These waves produce fluctuations in the temperature of the Cosmic Background Radiation ( CBR ) .
We calculate the multipole moments of the correlation function for these temperature fluctuations in a spatially-closed Friedman-Robertson-Walker ( FRW ) cosmological model .
The results are compared to the corresponding multipoles in the spatially-flat case .
The differences are small unless the density parameter today , \Omega _ { 0 } , is greater than 2 .