Gravitational waves (GW) are tensor perturbations of the metric of curved spacetime that propagate. The metric g is a matrix (or differential 2-form, to be specific) that fully describes the 4-dimensional manifold of a spacetime in general relativity. The components of the full metric gμν are the sum of an unperturbed metric and the perturbation hμν , which varies on a smaller scale (separated ...

We explicitly demonstrate that the known solutions for expanding impulsive spherical gravitational waves that have been obtained by a “cut and paste” method may be considered to be impulsive limits of the Robinson–Trautman vacuum type N solutions. We extend these results to all the generically distinct subclasses of these solutions in Minkowski, de Sitter and anti-de Sitter backgrounds. For the...

After extensively reviewing general relativistic gravitomagnetism, both historically and phenomenologically, we review in detail the so-called magnetic components of gravitational waves (GWs), which have to be taken into account in the context of the total response functions of interferometers for GWs propagating from arbitrary directions. Following the more recent approaches of this important ...

There is a lot of current interest in sources of gravitational waves and active ongoing projects to detect such radiation, such as the LIGO project. These are long wavelength, low frequency gravitational waves. LISA would be sensitive to much longer wavelengths and lower fluxes. However compact stellar objects can generate high frequency (10 16 -10 21 Hz) thermal gravitational radiation, which ...

Accelerating masses are predicted to emit radiation as gravitational waves. It has been suggested that these waves may interact differently with quantum mechanical systems than with classical matter. The possibility that a quantum system may act as a novel transducer between electromagnetism and gravitational waves is investigated. A proposed mechanism for interconversion between the two fields...

We present a new idea that allows us to detect gravitational waves without being disturbed by any kind of displacement noise, based on the fact that gravitational waves and test-mass motions affect the propagations of light differently. We demonstrate this idea by analyzing a simple toy model consisting of three equally-separated objects on a line. By taking a certain combination of light trave...

Gravitational waves propagating through a stationary gauge field transform into gauge field waves and back again. When multiple families of flavor-space locked gauge fields are present, the gravitational and gauge field waves exhibit novel dynamics. At high frequencies, the system behaves like coupled oscillators in which the gravitational wave is the central pacemaker. Due to energy conservati...

We propose a picture, within the pre-big-bang approach, in which the universe emerges from a bath of plane gravitational and dilatonic waves. The waves interact gravitationally breaking the exact plane symmetry and lead generically to gravitational collapse resulting in a singularity with the Kasner-like structure. The analytic relations between the Kasner exponents and the initial data are exp...