On gravitational shock waves in curved spacetimes

Abstract

Some years ago Dray and 't Hooft found the necessary and sufficient conditions to introduce a gravitational shock wave in a particular class of vacuum solutions to Einstein's equations. We extend this work to cover cases where non-vanishing matter fields and a cosmological constant are present. The sources of gravitational waves are massless particles moving along a null surface such as a horizon in the case of black holes. After we discuss the general case we give many explicit examples. Among them are the d-dimensional charged black hole (that includes the 4-dimensional Reissner-Nordström and the d-dimensional Schwarzschild solution as subcases), the 4-dimensional De Sitter and anti-De Sitter spaces (and the Schwarzschild-De Sitter black hole), the 3-dimensional anti-De Sitter black hole, as well as backgrounds with a covariantly constant null Killing vector. We also address the analogous problem for string-inspired gravitational solutions nd give a few examples.