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arXiv · 2608.19260

On the Tidal and Frame-Drag Fields in General Relativity

Rahulkumar Solanki
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Abstract

It is known that in vacuum, two infinitesimally separated timelike observers under free fall notice a relative acceleration due to the tidal field (or the `electric' part of the Weyl tensor), and if they are carrying inertial guidance gyroscopes, they notice relative precession between these gyroscopes due to the frame-drag field (or the `magnetic' part of the Weyl tensor). The frame-drag field thus has no Newtonian analog. In this paper, for a family of timelike observers carrying inertial gyroscopes and forming a congruence, we define these fields as constraint equations in the presence of matter using (1+3) covariant splitting of spacetime. Unlike Newtonian gravity, the relative velocities of the observers around a closed contour formed by their spatial separations (and a temporal vector that closes this contour if the congruence is not hypersurface orthogonal) do not add up to zero due to the frame-drag field and momentum density of the fluid. Moreover, the relative orientations of the gyroscope spins around the same contour do not generally cancel out due to the tidal field, the fluid variables (anisotropic pressure and energy density), and the spatial cross-product of relative velocities associated with the separation vectors that form the contour. Additionally, it is shown that even in the absence of the frame-drag field, neighboring observers see relative precession between their gyroscopes when their relative velocity and acceleration are non-parallel due to differential Thomas precession.

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Rahulkumar Solanki. 2026-08-18. On the Tidal and Frame-Drag Fields in General Relativity. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19260

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