Self-phase modulation of spherical gravitational waves

Impulsive spherical gravitational waves

Penrose’s identification with warp provides the general framework for constructing the continuous form of impulsive gravitational wave metrics. We present the 2-component spinor formalism for the derivation of the full family of impulsive spherical gravitational wave metrics which brings out the power in identification with warp and leads to the simplest derivation of exact solutions. These sol...

Detection of scalar gravitational waves with a hollow spherical antenna

We study the response and cross sections for the absorption of GW energy generated in a Jordan-BransDicke theory by a resonant mass detector shaped as a hollow sphere. As a source of the GW we take a binary system in the Newtonian approximation. For masses of the stars of the order of the solar mass, the emitted GW sweeps a range of frequencies which include the first resonant mode of the detec...

Stochastic backgrounds of gravitational waves and spherical detectors

The analysis of how a stochastic background of gravitational radiation interacts with a spherical detector is given in detail, which leads to explicit expressions for the system response functions, as well as for the cross-correlation matrix of different readout channels. It is shown that distinctive features of GW induced random detector excitations, relative to locally generated noise, are in...

Gravitational self-localization for spherical masses

On the integrability of spherical gravitational waves in vacuum

The general class of Robinson-Trautman metrics that describe gravitational radiation in the exterior of bounded sources in four space-time dimensions is shown to admit zero curvature formulation in terms of appropriately chosen two-dimensional gauge connections. The result, which is valid for either type II or III metrics, implies that the gravitational analogue of the Lienard-Wiechert fields o...