Related papers: Sachs equations and plane waves, I: Rosen universe…
Plane waves are regarded as the general solution of the wave equation. However the plane wave expansion of standing waves by means of complex phasors leads to a theory in which the time coordinate does not receive the same treatment as the…
We show how the Szekeres form of the line element is naturally adapted to study Penrose limits in classical string backgrounds. Relating the "old" colliding wave problem to the Penrose limiting procedure as employed in string theory we…
We discuss dynamical aspects of gravitational plane waves in Einstein theory with massless scalar fields. The general analytic solution describes colliding gravitational waves with constant polarization, which interact with scalar waves…
Penrose proposed that the big bang singularity should be constrained by requiring that the Weyl curvature vanishes there. The idea behind this past hypothesis is attractive because it constrains the initial conditions for the universe in…
Integrable structures arise in general relativity when the spacetime possesses a pair of commuting Killing vectors admitting 2-spaces orthogonal to the group orbits. The physical interpretation of such spacetimes depends on the norm of the…
A multidimensional gravitational model with several scalar fields and form fields is considered. A wide class of generalized pp-wave solutions defined on a product of n+1 Ricci-flat spaces is obtained. Certain examples of solutions (e.g. in…
We consider the stability of spatially homogeneous plane-wave spacetimes. We carry out a full analysis for plane-wave spacetimes in (4+1) dimensions, and find there are two cases to consider; what we call non-exceptional and exceptional. In…
We prove that Penrose limits of metrics with arbitrary singularities of power-law type show a universal leading u^{-2}-behaviour near the singularity provided that the dominant energy condition is satisfied and not saturated. For generic…
The Penrose plane wave limit is a remarkable property of Lorentzian spacetimes. Here, we discuss its extension to Finsler spacetimes by introducing suitable lightlike coordinates and adapting the Lorentzian definition of pp-waves. New…
We establish a lower bound on the total mass of the time slices of (n + 1)-dimensional asymptotically flat standard static spacetimes under the timelike convergence condition. The inequality can be viewed equivalently as a Minkowski-type…
The conformal flow of metrics [2] has been used to successfully establish a special case of the Penrose inequality, which yields a lower bound for the total mass of a spacetime in terms of horizon area. Here we show how to adapt the…
The existence of gravitational radiation is a natural prediction of any relativistic description of the gravitational interaction. In this chapter, we focus on gravitational waves, as predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity.…
What happens at spacetime singularities is poorly understood. The Penrose-Wall singularity theorem constrains possible scenarios, but until recently its key assumption--the generalized second law (GSL)--had only been proven perturbatively,…
This article presents a comprehensive and rigorous overview of spacetime singularities within the framework of classical General Relativity. Singularities are defined through the failure of geodesic completeness, reflecting the limits of…
Propagation of gravitational and acoustic plane waves in a flat universe filled with a general relativistic, homogeneous and isotropic, spatially flat continuum is studied. The continuum is described by analogues of nonrelativistic…
The celebrated geodesic congruence equation of Raychaudhuri, together with the resulting singularity theorems of Penrose and Hawking that it enabled, yield a highly general set of conditions under which a spacetime (or, more generically, a…
In this article we show that one can construct initial data for the Einstein equations which satisfy the vacuum constraints. This initial data is defined on a manifold with topology $R^3$ with a regular center and is asymptotically flat.…
In this short paper, Penrose's famous singularity theorem is applied to the Kerr space-time. In the case of the maximally extended space-time, the assumptions of Penrose's singularity theorem are not satisfied as the space-time is not…
We review recent work on the Einstein equations of general relativity when the curvature is defined in a weak sense. Weakly regular spacetimes are constructed, in which impulsive gravitational waves, as well as shock waves, propagate.
We propose a formulation of the Penrose plane wave limit in terms of null Fermi coordinates. This provides a physically intuitive (Fermi coordinates are direct measures of geodesic distance in space-time) and manifestly covariant…