Nonlinear coupled Alfvén and gravitational waves

Abstract

In this paper we consider nonlinear interaction between gravitational and electromagnetic waves in a strongly magnetized plasma. More specifically, we investigate the propagation of gravitational waves with the direction of propagation perpendicular to a background magnetic field, and the coupling to compressional Alfvén waves. The gravitational waves are considered in the high frequency limit and the plasma is modelled by a multifluid description. We make a self-consistent, weakly nonlinear analysis of the Einstein-Maxwell system and derive a wave equation for the coupled gravitational and electromagnetic wave modes. A WKB-approximation is then applied and as a result we obtain the nonlinear Schrödinger equation for the slowly varying wave amplitudes. The analysis is extended to 3D wave pulses, and we discuss the applications to radiation generated from pulsar binary mergers. It turns out that the electromagnetic radiation from a binary merger should experience a focusing effect, that in principle could be detected.

20 pages, revtex4, accepted in PRD

References in corpus (6)

• Resonant interaction between gravitational waves, electromagnetic waves and plasma flows
• Gravitational and magnetosonic waves in gamma-ray bursts
• GMSW as a detector of gravitational waves
• Parametric phenomena of the particle dynamics in a periodic gravitational wave field
• Nonlinear self-interaction of plane gravitational waves
• Self-phase modulation of spherical gravitational waves

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamics In Dynamical Spacetimes: Numerical Methods And Tests
• Brightening of an Accretion Disk Due to Viscous Dissipation of Gravitational Waves During the Coalescence of Supermassive Black Holes
• Excitation Of MHD Modes With Gravitational Waves: A Testbed For Numerical Codes
• The interaction of gravitational waves with strongly magnetized plasmas
• Interaction between gravitational waves and plasma waves in the Vlasov description
• Harmonic generation of gravitational wave induced Alfven waves
• Average nonlinear dynamics of particles in gravitational pulses: effective Hamiltonian, secular acceleration, and gravitational susceptibility
• Observable Signatures of EMRI Black Hole Binaries Embedded in Thin Accretion Disks
• Alfven modes driven non-linearly by metric perturbations in anisotropic magnetized cosmologies
• The influence of strong field vacuum polarization on gravitational-electromagnetic wave interaction