On the energy of gravitational waves

Abstract

The energy of gravitational waves is a fundamental problem in gravity theory. The existing descriptions for the energy of gravitational waves, such as the well-known Isaacson energy-momentum tensor, suffer from several defects. Due to the equivalence principle, the gravitational energy-momentum can only be defined quasilocally, being associated with a closed spacelike 2-surface bounding a region. We propose a new approach to derive the energy of gravitational waves $directly$ from the quasilocal gravitational energy. Such an approach is natural and consistent with the quasilocality of gravitational energy-momentum.

7 pages, 1 figure, 1 table; matches the published version

References in corpus (3)

• Quasilocal mass in general relativity
• Isometric embeddings into the Minkowski space and new quasi-local mass
• Extraction of Gravitational Waves in Numerical Relativity

Cited by in corpus (8)

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• Observable Gravitational Wave Strain at Second Order
• Covariant transverse-traceless projection for secondary gravitational waves
• The transverse-traceless gauge and the gauge problem of second order gravitational waves