Exact Disk Solution of the Einstein Equation

Abstract

The 4-soliton solution with complex pole trajectories to the vacuum Einstein equation is studied. The solution describes a static and axisymmetric gravitational field with asymptotic flatness, which is produced by a thin disk. We obtain the energy-momentum tensor of the to reveal its properties. The soliton technique 1 ) to solve the gravitational field equation gave us a new viewpoint on the exact solutions of the vacuum Einstein equation. There is an infinite series of solutions which are characterized by the soliton number n. In the stationary case with axial symmetry the series includes the Kerr-NUT solution as a 2-soliton solution and the Tomimatsu-Sato solution as a certain limit of 4-soliton solution. In the static case 2 ),3) there is an infinite series of the Weyl solutions, which is interpreted as a nonlinear superposition of multi-Weyl solutions. Two of the present authors 3 ),4) showed that the soliton technique gives not only these series of solutions but a series of ring-type solutions by adopting complex pole trajectories in the static case. The first non-trivial example of this series is the Weyl solution expressed in the oblate spheroidal coordinates,5) which has a ring-type curvature singularity. In our classification this solution is interpreted as the 2-soliton solution with non-complex-conjugate pole trajectories. The next example is the 4-soliton solution in which there are two types. One is just a nonlinear superposition of the above 2-soliton solutions, which has two ring-type singularities with different radii. The other, which is more important, is the 4-soliton solution constructed from two pairs of complex conjugate pole trajectories. This was referred to as the two­ ring solution, because the curvature invariants have finite limits at two rings although the metric coefficients diverge there. This fact contrasts with the fact that the curvature invariants diverge at the ring in the 2-soliton case. The purpose of this paper is to study the detailed structure of the two-ring solution. It will be shown that the solution should be called a solution rather than a ring solution. The properties of the will be also clarified by calculating the energy-momentum tensor. In the next section we give the solution in an explicit form and investigate its mathematical structure. From this we find that the plane containing the rings is separated into a regular region inside the inner ring and a region with the discontinuity of curvature outside the inner ring. We shall call this outer region a disk because of its non-zero energy density as will be.discussed in § 3. The is further divided into two parts by the outer ring. In § 3 we obtain the