Canonical Formulation of pp-waves
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
2008-11-26 v1
Abstract
We construct a Hamiltonian formulation for the class of plane-fronted gravitational waves with parallel rays (pp-waves). Because of the existence of a light-like Killing vector, the dynamics is effectively reduced to a 2+1 evolution with "time" chosen to be light-like. In spite of the vanishing action this allows us to geometrically identify a symplectic form as well as dynamical Hamiltonian, thus casting the system into canonical form.
Cite
@article{arxiv.0705.0228,
title = {Canonical Formulation of pp-waves},
author = {Herbert Balasin and Peter Aichelburg},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0705.0228},
year = {2008}
}