Type IIB Colliding Plane Waves

Abstract

Four-dimensional colliding plane wave (CPW) solutions have played an important role in understanding the classical non-linearities of Einstein's equations. In this note, we investigate CPW solutions in $2n+2$--dimensional Einstein gravity with a $n+1$-form flux. By using an isomorphism with the four-dimensional problem, we construct exact solutions analogous to the Szekeres vacuum solution in four dimensions. The higher-dimensional versions of the Khan-Penrose and Bell-Szekeres CPW solutions are studied perturbatively in the vicinity of the light-cone. We find that under small perturbations, a curvature singularity is generically produced, leading to both space-like and time-like singularities. For $n=4$, our results pertain to the collision of two ten-dimensional type IIB Blau - Figueroa o'Farrill - Hull - Papadopoulos plane waves.

20+10 pages, 2 figures, uses JHEP3.cls; v2: refs [3,10,22] corrected, remark added below (3.9) on inexistence of conformally flat CPW in our ansatz, final version to appear in JHEP

References in corpus (3)

• On lightcone string field theory from Super Yang-Mills and holography
• Plane waves and spacelike infinity
• Higher Dimensional Bell-Szekeres Metric

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• Colliding Plane Waves in String Theory
• Non-Markovian stochastic Liouville equation and anomalous relaxation kinetics
• Colliding Plane Wave Solutions in String theory Revisited
• Two-flux Colliding Plane Waves in String Theory