Plane Gravitational Waves, the Kinetic Energy of Free Particles and the Memory Effect

Abstract

It is shown that in the passage of a short burst of non-linear plane gravitational wave, the kinetic energy of free particles may either decrease or increase. The decreasing or increasing of the kinetic energy depends crucially on the initial conditions (position and velocity) of the free particle. Therefore a plane gravitational wave may extract energy from a physical system.

14 pages, 12 figures; References added

References in corpus (4)

• The teleparallel equivalent of general relativity
• The gravitational-wave memory effect
• The Memory Effect for Plane Gravitational Waves
• Soft Gravitons & the Memory Effect for Plane Gravitational Waves

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Cylindrical Systems in General Relativity
• Scaling and conformal symmetries for plane gravitational waves
• Niederer's transformation, time-dependent oscillators and polarized gravitational waves
• Variations of the Energy of Free Particles in the pp-Wave Spacetimes
• Tetrad Fields, Reference Frames, and the Gravitational Energy-Momentum in the Teleparallel Equivalent of General Relativity
• The Work-Energy Relation for Particles on Geodesics in the pp-Wave Spacetimes
• Non-linear Plane Gravitational Waves as Space-time Defects
• Memory Effect of Gravitational Wave Pulses in PP-Wave Spacetimes
• Energy-momentum and angular-momentum of a gyratonic pp-waves spacetime
• Gravitational Energy Creation in the Sandwich pp-Waves Collision
• Non canonical polarizations of Gravitational Waves
• Blueshift of light rays induced by gravitational wave memory effect