On the geometry of impulsive gravitational waves

Abstract

We describe impulsive gravitational pp-waves entirely in the distributional picture. Applying Colombeau's nonlinear framework of generalized functions we handle the formally ill-defined products of distributions which enter the geodesic as well as the geodesic deviation equation. Using a universal regularization procedure we explicitly derive regularization independent distributional limits. In the special case of impulsive plane waves we compare our results with the particle motion derived from the continuous form of the metric.

Unchanged from v2; Comment on publication status changed to: Prepared for "Proceedings of the 8-th National Romaninan Conference on GRG, Bistritza, June 1998", which to my best konwledge never appeared

References in corpus (3)

• Geodesics and geodesic deviation for impulsive gravitational waves
• Boosted static multipole particles as sources of impulsive gravitational waves
• New examples of sandwich gravitational waves and their impulsive limit

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