Exact ghost-free bigravitational waves

TL;DR

This paper derives exact ghost-free bigravity gravitational wave solutions, especially AdS waves, simplifying calculations via Kerr-Schild transformations and complex Euler-Darboux equations, and explores matter coupling with explicit solutions.

Contribution

It provides the first general solutions for AdS wave dynamics in ghost-free bigravity, including matter coupling scenarios, using novel mathematical techniques.

Findings

Explicit solutions for AdS waves in bigravity.

Simplified computation of interaction matrices via Kerr-Schild ansatz.

Characterization of matter sources supported by AdS waves.

Abstract

We study the propagation of exact gravitational waves in the ghost-free bimetric theory. Our focus is on type N spacetimes compatible with the cosmological constants provided by the bigravity interaction potential, and particularly in the single class known by allowing at least a Killing symmetry: the AdS waves. They have the advantage of being represented by a generalized Kerr-Schild transformation from AdS spacetime. This means a notorious simplification in bigravity by allowing to straightforwardly compute any power of its interaction square root matrix, opening the door to explore physically meaningful exact configurations. For these exact gravitational waves the complex dynamical structure of bigravity decomposes into elementary exact massless or massive excitations propagating on AdS. We use a complexified formulation of the Euler-Darboux equations to provide for the first time the general solutions to the massive version of the Siklos equation which rules the resulting AdS-waves dynamics, using an integral representation originally due to Poisson. Inspired in this progress we tackle the subtle problem on how matter couples to bigravity and concretely if this occurs through a composite metric, which is hard to handle in a general setting. Surprisingly, the Kerr-Schild ansatz brings again a huge simplification in how the related energy-momentum tensors are calculated. This allows us to explicitly characterize AdS waves supported in one case by a massless free scalar field and by a wavefront-homogeneous Maxwell field in another. Considering the most general allowed Maxwell source instead is a highly nontrivial task, that we accomplish by exploiting again the complexified Euler-Darboux description and taking advantage of the classical Riemann method. In fact, this allow us to find at the end the most general configurations for any matter source.