Related papers: A New Twist on the Geometry of Gravitational Plane…
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 find exact nonlinear solutions of general relativity that represent twisted gravitational waves (TGWs) in the presence of a cosmological constant. A TGW is a nonplanar wave propagating along a fixed spatial direction with a null Killing…
Motivated by the search for potentially exactly solvable time-dependent string backgrounds, we determine all homogeneous plane wave (HPW) metrics in any dimension and find one family of HPWs with geodesically complete metrics and another…
Twisted gravitational waves (TGWs) are nonplanar waves with twisted rays that move along a fixed direction in space. We study further the physical characteristics of a recent class of Ricci-flat solutions of general relativity representing…
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…
In general relativity (GR), linearized gravitational waves propagating in empty Minkowski spacetime along a fixed spatial direction have the property that the wave front is the Euclidean plane. Beyond the linear regime, exact plane waves in…
Twisted gravitational waves (TGWs) are nonplanar unidirectional Ricci-flat solutions of general relativity. Thus far only TGWs of Petrov type \emph{II} are implicitly known that depend on a solution of a partial differential equation and…
The purpose of this work is to return, with a new observation and rather unconventional point of view, to the study of asymptotically flat solutions of Einstein equations. The essential observation is that from a given asymptotically flat…
We study second order gravitational perturbations on plane wave spacetimes from both the metric and curvature perturbation points of view. For the former, we explicitly use the isometries of the background to introduce tensor oscillator…
We discuss an approach to gravitational waves based on Geometric Algebra and Gauge Theory Gravity. After a brief introduction to Geometric Algebra (GA), we consider Gauge Theory Gravity, which uses symmetries expressed within the GA of flat…
The isometries of an exact plane gravitational wave are symmetries for both massive and massless particles. Their conformal extensions are in fact chrono-projective transformations introduced earlier by Duval et al are symmetries for…
Utilizing the covariant formulation of Penrose's plane wave limit by Blau et~al., we construct for any semi-Riemannian metric $g$ a family of "plane wave limits." These limits are taken along any geodesic of $g$, yield simpler metrics of…
We study gravitational plane impulsive waves and electromagnetic shock waves in a scalar-tensor theory of gravity of the Brans-Dicke type. In vacuum, we present an exact solution of Brans-Dicke's field equations and give an example in which…
We consider a planar waveguide with "twisted" boundary conditions. By twisting we mean a special combination of Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions. Assuming that the width of the waveguide goes to zero, we identify the effective…
Refractive gravitational waves are a generalisation of impulsive waves on a null hypersurface in which the metric is discontinuous but a weaker continuity condition for areas holds. A simple example of a plane wave is examined in detail and…
Homogeneous gravitational wave backgrounds arise as infinite momentum limits of many geometries with a well-understood holographic description. General global aspects of these geometries are discussed. Using exact CFT techniques, strings in…
Vacuum gravitational fields admitting a light-like Killing field were systematically studied starting around 1960. Besides the already known plane waves, a second class of gravitational wave fields was found. In contrast to plane waves,…
The Newman-Penrose (NP) formalism is traditionally used to analyze the polarization content of gravitational waves, while the gauge-invariant Bardeen formalism provides a complementary, and often simpler, description based on the…
We derive the effects of a non-zero cosmological constant $\Lambda$ on gravitational wave propagation in the linearized approximation of general relativity. In this approximation we consider the situation where the metric can be written as…
Twisted geometry is a piecewise-flat geometry less rigid than Regge geometry. In Loop Gravity, it provides the classical limit for each step of the truncation utilized in the definition of the quantum theory. We define the torsionless…