Impulsive waves in ghost free infinite derivative gravity in anti-de Sitter spacetime

TL;DR

This paper investigates impulsive gravitational waves in anti-de Sitter spacetime within ghost free infinite derivative gravity, revealing that sources generate regularized wave solutions that differ from Einstein's theory only in the presence of matter.

Contribution

It constructs explicit impulsive wave solutions in infinite derivative gravity with sources, demonstrating regularization of singularities and consistency with general relativity in the infrared limit.

Findings

Source-free solutions match Einstein's gravity.

Sources produce regularized impulsive waves.

Solutions reduce to GR in the local limit.

Abstract

We study exact impulsive gravitational waves propagating in anti-de Sitter spacetime in the context of the ghost free infinite derivative gravity. We show that the source-free theory does not admit any AdS wave solutions other than that of Einstein's general relativity. The situation is significantly different in the presence of sources. We construct impulsive-wave solutions of the infinite derivative gravity generated by massless particles and linear sources in four and three dimensions. The singularities corresponding to distributional curvature at the locations of the sources get smeared by the non-localities. The obtained solutions are regular everywhere. They reduce to the corresponding solutions of general relativity in the infrared regime and in the local limit.