English

Bondi-Sachs Formalism

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2018-01-18 v3 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

The Bondi-Sachs formalism of General Relativity is a metric-based treatment of the Einstein equations in which the coordinates are adapted to the null geodesics of the spacetime. It provided the first convincing evidence that gravitational radiation is a nonlinear effect of general relativity and that the emission of gravitational waves from an isolated system is accompanied by a mass loss from the system. The asymptotic behaviour of the Bondi-Sachs metric revealed the existence of the symmetry group at null infinity, the Bondi-Metzner-Sachs group, which turned out to be larger than the Poincare group.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1609.01731,
  title  = {Bondi-Sachs Formalism},
  author = {Thomas Mädler and Jeffrey Winicour},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.01731},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

Scholarpedia review article, an up-to-date version can be found under http://scholarpedia.org/article/Bondi-Sachs_Formalism, includes general normalisation of unit sphere dyad, corrected typos, additional references

R2 v1 2026-06-22T15:41:49.129Z