Related papers: The gravity of light
According to the classical Einstein-Maxwell theory of gravity and electromagnetism, a light-wave traveling in empty space-time is accompanied by a gravitational field of the pp-type. Therefore point masses are scattered by a light wave,…
Light waves carry along their own gravitational field; for simple plain electromagnetic waves the gravitational field takes the form of a pp-wave. I present the corresponding exact solution of the Einstein-Maxwell equations and discuss the…
The main object of the proposed theory is not a pseudometric, but a symmetric affine connection on the Minkowski space. The coefficients of this connection have one upper and two lower indices. These coefficients are symmetric with respect…
Non-vacuum exact gravitational waves invariant for a non Abelian two-dimensional Lie algebra generated by two Killing fields whose commutator is of light type, are described. The polarization of these waves, already known from previous…
An explanation is proposed for the fact that pp-waves superpose linearly when they propagate parallely, while they interact nonlinearly, scatter and form singularities or Cauchy horizons if they are antiparallel. Parallel pp-waves do…
The gravitational field of an idealized plane-wave solution of the Maxwell equations can be described in closed form. After discussing this particular solution of the Einstein-Maxwell equations, the motion of neutral test particles, which…
We show that gravity together with curved spacetime can emerge, at the microscopic scale, from a U(1) gauge field. The gauge boson that carries gravity, of elementary particles, is proved to be a spin one massless and electrically neutral…
The problem of quantum gravity is treated from a radically new viewpoint based on a detailed mathematical analysis of what the constitution of physical space is, which has been carried out by Michel Bounias and the author. The approach…
A gravitational wave must be nonlinear to be able to transport its own source, that is, energy and momentum. A physical gravitational wave, therefore, cannot be represented by a solution to a linear wave equation. Relying on this property,…
One might expect light to be scattered when it passes through a gravitational wave, and might hope that in favourable circumstances these scatterings could be observed on Earth even if the interaction occurs far away. Damour and…
We consider the classical theory of a gravitational field with spin 2 and non-vanishing (Pauli-Fierz) mass in flat spacetime, coupled to electromagnetism and point particles. We establish the law of light propagation and calculate the…
This paper aims to discuss two issues that can have a significant impact on the foundations of the theory of gravitation: (1). The existence of relativity of space-time geometry with respect to the properties of used reference frame, which…
Einstein's relativity theory appears to be very accurate, but at times equally puzzling. On the one hand, electromagnetic radiation must have zero rest mass in order to propagate at the speed of light, but on the other hand, since it…
Each approach to the quantum-gravity problem originates from expertise in one or another area of theoretical physics. The particle-physics perspective encourages one to attempt to reproduce in quantum gravity as much as possible of the…
All attempts to quantize gravity face several difficult problems. Among these problems are: (i) metric positivity (positivity of the spatial distance between distinct points), (ii) the presence of anomalies (partial second-class nature of…
The principles of quantum field theory in flat spacetime suggest that gravity is mediated by a massless particle with helicity $\pm2$, the so-called graviton. It is regarded as textbook knowledge that, when the self-coupling of a particle…
The aim of these notes is to give an accessible and self-contained introduction to the theory of gravitational waves as the theory of a relativistic symmetric tensor field in a Minkowski background spacetime. This is the approach of a…
General relativity and its cosmological solution predicts the existence of tensor modes of perturbations evolving on top of our Friedman-Lema\^itre-Robertson-Walker expanding Universe. Being gauge invariant and not necessarily coupled to…
In a recent paper [1], it was introduced a new class of gravitational theories with two local degrees of freedom. The existence of these theories apparently challenges the distinctive role of general relativity as the unique non-linear…
Spacetimes generated by a lightlike particle source for topologically massive gravity and its limits - Einstein gravity and the pure gravitational Chern-Simons model - are obtained both by solving the field equations and by infinite boosts…