Geodesic deviation in Kundt spacetimes of any dimension

Conference paper

Geodesic deviation in Kundt spacetimes of any dimension

Švarc, R.; Podolský, J.

Abstract

Using the invariant form of the equation of
geodesic deviation, which describes relative motion of free test
particles, we investigate a general family of D-dimensional
Kundt spacetimes. We demonstrate that local influence of the
gravitational field can be naturally decomposed into Newton-
type tidal effects typical for type II spacetimes, longitudinal
deformations mainly present in spacetimes of algebraic type III,
and type N purely transverse effects corresponding to
gravitational waves with D(D − 3)/2 independent polarization
states. We explicitly study the most important examples,
namely exact pp-waves, gyratons, and VSI spacetimes. This
analysis helps us to clarify the geometrical and physical
interpretation of the Kundt class of nonexpanding, nontwisting
and shearfree geometries.

Institute authors

Supported by

GACR 202/09/0772 — Current problems of gravitation, general relativity and relativistic astrophysics
GACR 203/12/0118 — Spacetimes and Fields in Higher Dimensional and Classical Gravity
MSM0021620860 — Fyzikální studium objektů a procesů ve sluneční soustavě a v astro-fyzikálních systémech
SVV-265301 — Aktuální problémy teoretické fyziky, astronomie a astrofyziky

BibTeX

@inproceedings{UTF489,
  author        = {Švarc, R. and Podolský, J.},
  title         = {{Geodesic deviation in Kundt spacetimes of any dimension}},
  year          = {2014},
}