Vacuum gravitational fields invariant for a non Abelian Lie algebra generated by two Killing fields whose commutator is light-like are analyzed. It is shown that they represent nonlinear gravitational waves obeying to two nonlinear superposition laws. The energy and the polarization of this family of waves are explicitely evaluated.
In general relativity (GR), gravitational waves (GWs) propagate the well-known plus and cross polarization modes which are the signature of a massless spin-2 field. However, diffraction of GWs caused by intervening objects along the line of sight can
cause the apparent rise of additional polarizations due to GW-curvature interactions. In this paper, we continue the analysis by two of the authors of the present article, on lensing of gravitational waves beyond geometric optics. In particular, we calculate the lensing effect caused by a point-like lens, in the regime where its Schwarzschild radius $R_s$ is much smaller than the wavelength $lambda$ of the signal, itself smaller than the impact parameter $b$. In this case, the curvature of spacetime induces distortions in the polarization of the wave such that effective scalar and vector polarizations may appear. We find that the amplitude of these apparent non-GR polarizations is suppressed by a factor $R_slambda/b^2$ with respect to the amplitude of the GR-like tensor modes. We estimate the probability to develop these extra polarization modes for a nearly monochromatic GW in the Pulsar Timing Arrays band traveling through a distribution of galaxies.
Non-vacuum exact gravitational waves invariant for a non Abelian two-dimensional Lie algebra generated by two Killing fields whose commutator is of light type, are described. The polarization of these waves, already known from previous works, is rela
ted to the sources. Non vacuum exact gravitational waves admitting only one Killing field of light type are also discussed.
Strong-field gravitational plane waves are often represented in either the Rosen or Brinkmann forms. These forms are related by a coordinate transformation, so they should describe essentially the same physics, but the two forms treat polarization st
ates quite differently. Both deal well with linear polarizations, but there is a qualitative difference in the way they deal with circular, elliptic, and more general polarization states. In this article we will describe a general algorithm for constructing arbitrary polarization states in the Rosen form.
Wave propagation of field disturbances is ubiquitous. The electromagnetic and gravitational are cousin theories in which the corresponding waves play a relevant role to understand several related physical. It has been established that small electroma
gnetic waves can generate gravitational waves and vice versa when scattered by a charged black hole. In the realm of cylindrical spacetimes, we present here a simple nonlinear effect of the conversion of electromagnetic to gravitational waves reflected by the amount of mass extracted from them.
Riroriro is a Python package to simulate the gravitational waveforms of binary mergers of black holes and/or neutron stars, and calculate several properties of these mergers and waveforms, specifically relating to their observability by gravitational
wave detectors. The gravitational waveform simulation of Riroriro is based upon the methods of Buskirk and Babiuc-Hamilton (2019), a paper which describes a computational implementation of an earlier theoretical gravitational waveform model by Huerta et al. (2017), using post-Newtonian expansions and an approximation called the implicit rotating source to simplify the Einstein field equations and simulate gravitational waves. Riroriros calculation of signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) of gravitational wave events is based on the methods of Barrett et al. (2018), with the simpler gravitational wave model Findchirp (Allen et al. (2012)) being used for comparison and calibration in these calculations.