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arXiv · 1509.04914

Geodesics in nonexpanding impulsive gravitational waves with $\Lambda$, Part I

Abstract

We investigate the geodesics in the entire class of nonexpanding impulsive gravitational waves propagating in an (anti-)de Sitter universe using the distributional form of the metric. Employing a 5-dimensional embedding formalism and a general regularisation technique we prove existence and uniqueness of geodesics crossing the wave impulse leading to a completeness result. We also derive the explicit form of the geodesics thereby confirming previous results derived in a heuristic approach.

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Clemens Sämann, Roland Steinbauer, Alexander Lecke, Jiří Podolský. 2015-09-16. Geodesics in nonexpanding impulsive gravitational waves with $\Lambda$, Part I. https://doi.org/10.1088/0264-9381%2F33%2F11%2F115002

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