Related papers: PP-WAVES (the original article)
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.
We discuss polarization of gravitational radiation within the standard framework of linearized general relativity. The recent experimental discovery of gravitational waves provides the impetus to revisit the implications of the…
In this article, I present an elementary introduction to the theory of gravitational waves. This article is meant for students who have had an exposure to general relativity, but, results from general relativity used in the main discussion…
The polarization of electromagnetic waves in the presence of a gravitational wave is analyzed. The rotation of the polarization angle and the Stokes parameters are deduced. A possible application to the detection of stochastic background of…
A brief introduction to gravitational waves, addressing those questions that nowadays more and more frequently arise within a large audience (not only of insiders): what is a gravity wave, how can it be detected and, above all, what impact…
The standard linear approach to the gravitational waves theory is critically reviewed. Contrary to the prevalent understanding, it is pointed out that this theory contains many conceptual and technical obscure issues that require further…
I give an overview of the motivations for gravitational-wave research, concentrating on the aspects related to ``fundamental'' physics.
The stability of the spin of pulsars and the precision with which these spins can be determined, allows many unique tests of interest to physics and astrophysics. Perhaps the most challenging and revolutionary of these, is the detection of…
It is presented a brief review on gravitational waves (GWs). It is shown how the wave equation is obtained from Einstein's equations and how many and how are the polarization modes of these waves. It is discussed the reasons why GWs sources…
In this paper we study strings with quantized masses in the pp-wave background. We obtain these strings from the membrane theory. For achieving to this, one of the membrane and one of the spacetime directions will be identified and wrapped.…
These lecture notes collect the material that I have been using over the years for various short courses on the physics of gravitational waves, first at the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris (France), and then at SISSA (Italy) and various…
In this work, we study the dynamics of a spinning particle in pp-waves spacetimes; in particular, plane gravitational waves and impulsive shockwaves. W pay special attention to analytical considerations; this is possible due to an…
The description of the gravitation energy is a long standing problem. Although some success has been achieved, there is no satisfactory solution to this problem yet. Probably the most promising approach to this problem is given by…
The physical properties of electromagnetic waves in the presence of a gravitational plane wave are analyzed. Formulas for the Stokes parameters describing the polarization of light are obtained in closed form. The particular case of a…
In this article, spatially-structured gravitational waves are investigated. Drawing upon analogies between electrodynamics and general relativity, a new gauge is found. We investigate the polarization and degrees of freedom of the resulting…
We derive a relation between the two polarization modes of a plane, linear gravitational wave in the second-order approximation. Since these two polarizations are not independent, an initially monochromatic gravitational wave loses its…
We generalize our previous linear result [1] in obtaining gravitational waves from our piecewise flat model for gravity in 3+1 dimensions to exact piecewise flat configurations describing exact planar gravitational waves. We show explicitly…
We study the gravitational waves in spacetimes of arbitrary dimension. They generalize the pp-waves and the Kundt waves, obtained earlier in four dimensions. Explicit solutions of the Einstein and Einstein-Maxwell equations are derived for…
Exact plane gravitational radiation fields are presented within the framework of general relativity and their properties are described. The physics of nonlinear elliptically polarized plane gravitational waves is developed in close analogy…
In this paper we obtain strings that propagate in the quantized pp-wave backgrounds. We can obtain these strings from the solutions of membrane. The other way is the propagation of a massless string in a spacetime with two time dimensions.…