English

Geodesics in nonexpanding impulsive gravitational waves with $\Lambda$, Part I

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2016-05-03 v2 Mathematical Physics math.MP

Abstract

We investigate the geodesics in the entire class of nonexpanding impulsive gravitational waves propagating in an (anti-)de Sitter universe using the distributional form of the metric. Employing a 5-dimensional embedding formalism and a general regularisation technique we prove existence and uniqueness of geodesics crossing the wave impulse leading to a completeness result. We also derive the explicit form of the geodesics thereby confirming previous results derived in a heuristic approach.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1509.04914,
  title  = {Geodesics in nonexpanding impulsive gravitational waves with $\Lambda$, Part I},
  author = {Clemens Sämann and Roland Steinbauer and Alexander Lecke and Jiří Podolský},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1509.04914},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

32 pages, 3 figures, minor revisions, included "Part I" in the title, final version

R2 v1 2026-06-22T10:58:05.102Z