Creating spacetime shortcuts with gravitational waveforms

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how to create a gravitational wave region that acts as a spacetime shortcut, allowing certain geodesics to move faster than light relative to distant observers, using Gaussian beam-like waveforms.

Contribution

It introduces a method to construct gravitational waveforms that produce spacetime shortcuts, a novel concept in gravitational wave physics.

Findings

Region-delimited gravitational wave fields can induce faster-than-light geodesics.

Constructed waveforms are analogous to Gaussian beams in optics.

Null geodesics in the region can surpass the speed of light relative to distant observers.

Abstract

A region-delimited gravitational wave field can be constructed, such that a subset of geodesics crossing this region will move faster than nearby geodesics moving entirely inside flat spacetime, along a preferred direction. Null geodesics inside this region will move faster-than-light according to far away observers. The waveform is synthesized from homogeneous plane wave solutions, and the resulting field is the gravitational equivalent of a Gaussian beam.