Gauge invariants of linearized gravity with a general background metric
arXiv:2105.04680 · doi:10.1088/1361-6382/aca067
Abstract
In linearized gravity with distributed matter, the background metric has no generic symmetries, and decomposition of the metric perturbation into global normal modes is generally impractical. This complicates the identification of the gauge-invariant part of the perturbation, which is a concern, for example, in the theory of dispersive gravitational waves whose energy--momentum must be gauge-invariant. Here, we propose how to identify the gauge-invariant part of the metric perturbation and the six independent gauge invariants \textit{per~se} for an arbitrary background metric. For the Minkowski background, the operator that projects the metric perturbation on the invariant subspace is proportional to the well-known dispersion operator of linear gravitational waves in~vacuum. For a general background, this operator is expressed in terms of the Green's operator of the vacuum wave equation. If the background is smooth, it can be found asymptotically using the inverse scale of the background metric as a small parameter.
References in corpus (9)
- Second-order Gauge Invariant Cosmological Perturbation Theory: -- Einstein equations in terms of gauge invariant variables --
- Damping of gravitational waves by matter
- Quasilinear theory for inhomogeneous plasma
- Ponderomotive dynamics of waves in quasiperiodically modulated media
- Cosmological Perturbations and Invariant Observables in Geodesic Lightcone Coordinates
- The interaction of gravitational waves with strongly magnetized plasmas
- Wave-kinetic approach to zonal-flow dynamics: recent advances
- Gravitational wave modes in matter
- Average nonlinear dynamics of particles in gravitational pulses: effective Hamiltonian, secular acceleration, and gravitational susceptibility