Stationary solutions in the small-$c$ expansion of GR
Abstract
We study the small- expansion of general relativity in ADM variables up to next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO). We show that, in the stationary sector, this formulation renders the field equations more tractable for explicit solution building. The stationary sector exhibits both strong- and weak-gravity branches, whose structure becomes richer at NNLO. In the strong-gravity branch, we first obtain exact vacuum solutions of NLO Carroll gravity, including the Lense--Thirring and rotating C-metric backgrounds. At NNLO, we then construct the corresponding Lense--Thirring-type and C-metric-type exact vacuum geometries. These solutions also arise from the small- expansion of the Kerr and rotating C-metric geometries around the strong-gravity background, up to at NLO and up to at NNLO. In the weak-gravity branch, we find exact Hartle--Thorne-type solutions with an independent quadrupole moment, together with exact spin-squared corrections and a mixed quadrupolar-rotating solution. We further extend the sector by including higher multipoles up to , where denotes the multipole index. These results show that the full NLO/NNLO theory admits a richer stationary vacuum sector than the magnetic Carroll truncation. More broadly, the ADM formulation provides a practical framework for constructing and analyzing stationary backgrounds in the small- expansion of general relativity, and may also offer a useful framework for organizing rotational and higher-multipole deformations relevant to compact astrophysical objects such as slowly rotating black holes and neutron stars.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.23677,
title = {Stationary solutions in the small-$c$ expansion of GR},
author = {Enes Bal and Ertuğrul Ekiz and Emre Onur Kahya and Utku Zorba},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.23677},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
38 pages