Absence of gyratons in the Robinson-Trautman class
Švarc, R.; Podolský, J.
We present the Riemann and Ricci tensors for a fully general non-twisting and shear-free geometry in arbitrary dimension D. This includes both the non-expanding Kundt and expanding Robinson-Trautman family of spacetimes. As an interesting application of these explicit expressions we then integrate the Einstein equations and prove a surprising fact that in any D the Robinson-Trautman class does not admit solutions representing gyratonic sources, i.e., matter field in the form of a null fluid (or particles propagating with the speed of light) with an additional internal spin. Contrary to the closely related Kundt class and pp-waves, the corresponding off-diagonal metric components thus do not encode the angular momentum of some gyraton. Instead, we demonstrate that in standard D=4 general relativity they directly determine two independent amplitudes of the Robinson-Trautman exact gravitational waves.
type: | article |
journal: | Phys. Rev. D |
volume: | 89 |
nr: | 12 |
pages: | 124029 |
year: | 2014 |
month: | 6 |
eprint: | arXiv:1406.0729 |
grants: | Spacetimes and Fields in Higher Dimensional and Classical Gravity, GAČR 203/12/0118 ; 2012-2016; hlavní řešitel: Jiří Podolský |