English

Plane waves in the generalized Galileon theory

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2012-10-23 v3 High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We present an exact plane wave solution of the most general shift-symmetric Horndeski (generalized Galileon) theory. The solution consists of the scalar part, and the gravitational part with two polarization modes. The former is due to the presence of the non-trivial Galileon scalar field, and it is parametrized by an arbitrary function of the light-cone coordinate. For a trivial scalar field configuration the solution is equivalent to the plane gravitational wave in General Relativity. When the metric is Minkowski, we reproduce known results for the plane waves of k-essence and a soliton-like solutions of a non-covariant Galileon model in a flat space-time.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1207.4764,
  title  = {Plane waves in the generalized Galileon theory},
  author = {Eugeny Babichev},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1207.4764},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

RevTeX4 format, 5 pages; v2: references added; v3: some explanations added, matches published version

R2 v1 2026-06-21T21:38:40.576Z