The collision of plane waves in general relativity

Hayward, Sean Alan (1990) The collision of plane waves in general relativity. University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis.

Abstract

The thesis is concerned with the collision of two plane gravitational waves according to Einstein's general theory of relativity. As a preliminary, the relevant properties of plane waves are discussed, including the formalism for the collision of two general plane waves is described using a distributional approach, and the variables encoding the coordinate freedom and the incoming gravitational radiation are identified. The case of gravitational waves is described in detail, including various formal developments such as finding canonical coordinates and fixing the coordinate freedom.

A treatment of electromagnetic and other waves is also included. Global analysis of some particular exact solutions leads to surprising results, both for colliding waves and in other areas of general relativily: collisions which produce a horizon rather than a curvature singularity, the creation of cosmic spindles, black holes with non-singular interiors, and spacctimcs representing snapping cosmic strings. A more realistic generalisation of colliding waves to interacting asymptotic waves is presented and developed. The key problem-of determining whether the caustic created by the collision is generically a horizon or a curvature singularity-is solved in the collinear

This record has no associated files available for download.

Contributors

Download statistics