Related papers: Rigidity of geodesic completeness in the Brinkmann…
We investigate geodesic completeness in the full family of pp-wave or Brinkmann spacetimes in their extended as well as in their impulsive form. This class of geometries contains the recently studied gyratonic pp-waves, modelling the…
We argue that the well-known geodesic completeness property of pp-waves, can be disregarded once the geodesics are extracted as being extended along sets of Brinkmann coordinates. This issue is investigated in the more general context of…
We conduct a review of the basic definitions and the principal results in the study of wavelike spacetimes, that is spacetimes whose metric models massless radiation moving at the speed of light, focusing in particular on those geometries…
We show that the absence of unbounded algebraic curvature invariants constructed from polynomials of the Riemann tensor cannot guarantee the absence of strong singularities. As a consequence, it is not sufficient to rely solely on the…
Gravitational waves with parallel rays are known to have remarkable properties: Their orbit space of null rays possesses the structure of a non-relativistic spacetime of codimension-one. Their geodesics are in one-to-one correspondence with…
We systematically investigate the complete class of vacuum solutions in the Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity theory which belong to the Kundt family of non-expanding, shear-free and twist-free geometries (without gyratonic matter terms) in any…
Brinkmann Lorentz manifolds are those admitting an isotropic parallel vector field. We prove geodesic completeness of the compact and also compactly homogeneous Brinkmann spaces. We also prove, partially, that their parallel vector field…
New rigidity results for complete non-compact spacelike submanifolds of arbitrary codimension in plane fronted waves are obtained. Under appropriate assumptions, we prove that a complete spacelike submanifold in these spacetimes is…
The Gauss-Bonnet gravity is a special case of so-called Quadratic Gravity, which is an extension of Einstein's theory with additional terms in action that are quadratic combinations of the Riemann tensor and its contractions. These…
We investigate a general metric of the Kundt class of spacetimes in higher dimensions. Geometrically, it admits a non-twisting, non-shearing and non-expanding geodesic null congruence. We calculate all components of the curvature and Ricci…
In 1962, Ehlers and Kundt conjectured that plane waves are the only class of complete Ricci-flat~\emph{pp}-waves, i.e.\ metrics on ${\mathbb R}^4$ of the form \[ ds^2=2du\,dv+dx^2+dy^2+H(x,y,u)du^2\,. \] Recently, Flores and S\'{a}nchez…
We investigate exact plane-fronted gravitational wave (pp-wave) solutions within the framework of shift-symmetric quadratic-order higher-order scalar--tensor (HOST) theories. These solutions represent fully nonlinear radiative spacetimes…
Brinkmann's plane-fronted gravitational waves with parallel rays --~shortly pp-waves~-- are shown to provide, under suitable conditions, exact string vacua at all orders of the sigma-model perturbation expansion.
Plane waves are a special class of Lorentzian spaces with a parallel null vector field. They are of great importance in Geometry (e.g. Lorentzian holonomy) and in Physics (General Relativity as well as alternative gravity theories). Our…
We investigate geodesics in specific Kundt type N (or conformally flat) solutions to Einstein's equations. Components of the curvature tensor in parallelly transported tetrads are then explicitly evaluated and analyzed. This elucidates some…
In this work we study Randers spacetimes of Berwald type and analyze Pfeifer and Wohlfarth's vacuum field equation of Finsler gravity for this class. We show that in this case the field equation is equivalent to the vanishing of the Finsler…
The question of geodesic completeness of cosmological spacetimes has recently received renewed scrutiny. A particularly interesting result is the observation that the well-known Borde-Guth-Vilenkin (BGV) theorem may misdiagnose geodesically…
Type N spacetimes of the Kundt class are presented as solutions to Einstein's equations sourced by a real scalar field whose equation of motion is conformally invariant and that generalizes the standard conformal scalar field. The specific…
Ehlers-Kundt conjecture is a physical assertion about the fundamental role of plane waves for the description of gravitational waves. Mathematically, it becomes equivalent to a problem on the Euclidean plane ${\mathbb R}^2$ with a very…
We present the complete family of space-times with a non-expanding, shear-free, twist-free, geodesic principal null congruence (Kundt waves) that are of algebraic type III and for which the cosmological constant ($\Lambda_c$) is non-zero.…