English

Vacuum Kundt Waves

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2013-02-07 v4 Differential Geometry

Abstract

We discuss the invariant classification of vacuum Kundt waves using the Cartan-Karlhede algorithm, and the upper bound on the number of iterations of the Karlhede algorithm to classify the vacuum Kundt waves. By choosing a particular coordinate system we partially construct the canonical coframe used in the classification to study the functional dependence of the invariants arising at each iteration of the algorithm. We provide a new upper bound q4q \leq 4 and show this bound is sharp by analyzing the subclass of Kundt waves with invariant count beginning with (0,1,...) to show that the class with invariant count (0,1,3,4,4)(0,1,3,4,4) exists. This class of vacuum Kundt waves is shown to be unique as the only set of metrics requiring the fourth covariant derivatives of the curvature. We conclude with an invariant classification of the vacuum Kundt waves using a suite of invariants.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1208.5027,
  title  = {Vacuum Kundt Waves},
  author = {David McNutt and Robert Milson and Alan Coley},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1208.5027},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

30 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T21:54:59.607Z