Numerical estimation of the curvature of a light wavefront in a weak gravitational field

Abstract

The geometry of a light wavefront evolving in the 3--space associated with a post-Newtonian relativistic spacetime from a flat wavefront is studied numerically by means of the ray tracing method. For a discretization of the bidimensional wavefront the surface fitting technique is used to determine the curvature of this surface at each vertex of the mesh. The relationship between the curvature of a wavefront and the change of the arrival time at different points on the Earth is also numerically discussed.

22 pages, 6 figs, accepted in Classical and Quantum Gravity

References in corpus (4)

• General post-Minkowskian expansion of time transfer functions
• World function and time transfer: general post-Minkowskian expansions
• A General Relativistic Model of Light Propagation in the Gravitational Field of the Solar System: the Static Case
• Numerical Simulations of the Light Propagation in the Gravitational Field of Moving Bodies

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Numerical treatment of the light propagation problem in the post-Newtonian formalism