Generalizing the Penrose cut-and-paste method: Null shells with pressure and energy flux

Abstract

The cut-and-paste method is a procedure for constructing null thin shells by matching two regions of the same spacetime across a null hypersurface. Originally proposed by Penrose, it has so far allowed to describe purely gravitational and null-dust shells in constant-curvature backgrounds. In this paper, we extend the cut-and-paste method to null shells with arbitrary gravitational/matter content. To that aim, we first derive a locally Lipschitz continuous form of the metric of the spacetime resulting from the most general matching of two constant-curvature spacetimes with totally geodesic null boundaries, and then obtain the coordinate transformation that turns this metric into the cut-and-paste form with a Dirac-delta term. The paper includes an example of a null shell with non-trivial energy density, energy flux and pressure in Minkowski space.