English

Numerical estimation of the curvature of a light wavefront in a weak gravitational field

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2010-02-26 v1 Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

The geometry of a light wavefront evolving in the 3--space associated with a post-Newtonian relativistic spacetime from a flat wavefront is studied numerically by means of the ray tracing method. For a discretization of the bidimensional wavefront the surface fitting technique is used to determine the curvature of this surface at each vertex of the mesh. The relationship between the curvature of a wavefront and the change of the arrival time at different points on the Earth is also numerically discussed.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0910.4559,
  title  = {Numerical estimation of the curvature of a light wavefront in a weak gravitational field},
  author = {A. San Miguel and F. Vicente and J. -F. Pascual-Sanchez},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0910.4559},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

22 pages, 6 figs, accepted in Classical and Quantum Gravity