English

Spin optics for gravitational waves

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2022-12-07 v3 Optics

Abstract

We present the geometric optics expansion for circularly polarized gravitational waves on a curved spacetime background, to subleading order. We call spin optics to the subleading order geometric optics expansion, which involves modifying the standard eikonal function by including a specially chosen helicity-dependent correction. We show that the techniques developed for the propagation of electromagnetic waves can also be applied to gravitational waves in the limit of spin optics. However, one needs to account for the difference in the photon and graviton helicity, which we do here.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2107.02761,
  title  = {Spin optics for gravitational waves},
  author = {Pravin Kumar Dahal},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.02761},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

10 pages, 0 figures; Matches published version

R2 v1 2026-06-24T03:56:26.885Z