No Arabic abstract
We consider restrictions placed by geodesic completeness on spacetimes possessing a null parallel vector field, the so-called Brinkmann spacetimes. This class of spacetimes includes important idealized gravitational wave models in General Relativity, namely the plane-fronted waves with parallel rays, or pp-waves, which in turn have been intensely and fruitfully studied in the mathematical and physical literatures for over half a century. More concretely, we prove a restricted version of a conjectural analogue for Brinkmann spacetimes of a rigidity result obtained by M.T. Anderson for stationary spacetimes. We also highlight its relation with a long-standing 1962 conjecture by Ehlers and Kundt. Indeed, it turns out that the subclass of Brinkmann spacetimes we consider in our main theorem is enough to settle an important special case of the Ehlers-Kundt conjecture in terms of the well known class of Cahen-Wallach spaces.
We define the notion of geodesic completeness for semi-Riemannian metrics of low regularity in the framework of the geometric theory of generalized functions. We then show completeness of a wide class of impulsive gravitational wave space-times.
Type A surfaces are the locally homogeneous affine surfaces which can be locally described by constant Christoffel symbols. We address the issue of the geodesic completeness of these surfaces: we show that some models for Type A surfaces are geodesically complete, that some others admit an incomplete geodesic but model geodesically complete surfaces, and that there are also others which do not model any complete surface. Our main result provides a way of determining whether a given set of constant Christoffel symbols can model a complete surface.
We consider the primordial gravitational wave (GW) background in a class of spatially-flat inflationary cosmological models with cold dark matter (CDM), a cosmological constant, and a broken-scale-invariant (BSI) steplike primordial (initial) spectrum of adiabatic perturbations produced in an exactly solvable inflationary model where the inflaton potential has a rapid change of its first derivative at some point. In contrast to inflationary models with a scale-free initial spectrum, these models may have a GW power spectrum whose amplitude (though not its shape) is arbitrary for fixed amplitude and shape of the adiabatic perturbations power spectrum. In the presence of a positive cosmological constant, the models investigated here possess the striking property that a significant part of the large-angle CMB temperature anisotropy observed in the COBE experiment is due to primordial GW. Confronting them with existing observational data on CMB angular temperature fluctuations, galaxy clustering and peculiar velocities of galaxies, we find that for the best parameter values Omega_Lambda=0.7 and h=0.7, the GW contribution to the CMB anisotropy can be as large as that of the scalar fluctuations.
We consider the problem of essential self-adjointness of the spatial part of the Klein-Gordon operator in stationary spacetimes. This operator is shown to be a Laplace-Beltrami type operator plus a potential. In globally hyperbolic spacetimes, essential selfadjointness is proven assuming smoothness of the metric components and semi-boundedness of the potential. This extends a recent result for static spacetimes to the stationary case. Furthermore, we generalize the results to certain non-globally hyperbolic spacetimes.
In this paper we introduce a new approach to the study of the effects that an impulsive wave, containing a mixture of material sources and gravitational waves, has on a geodesic congruence that traverses it. We find that the effect of the wave on the congruence is a discontinuity in the B-tensor of the congruence. Our results thus provide a detector independent and covariant characterization of gravitational memory.