Gauge invariants of linearized gravity with a general background metric

TL;DR

This paper develops a method to identify gauge-invariant components of metric perturbations in linearized gravity for arbitrary backgrounds, crucial for analyzing gravitational waves and their energy-momentum.

Contribution

It introduces a general approach to extract gauge invariants in linearized gravity on any background metric, extending previous methods limited to symmetric backgrounds.

Findings

Identifies six independent gauge invariants for any background metric.

Expresses the projection operator in terms of the Green's operator of the vacuum wave equation.

Provides an asymptotic method for smooth backgrounds using inverse scale as a small parameter.

Abstract

In linearized gravity with distributed matter, the background metric has no generic symmetries, and decomposition of the metric perturbation into global normal modes is generally impractical. This complicates the identification of the gauge-invariant part of the perturbation, which is a concern, for example, in the theory of dispersive gravitational waves whose energy--momentum must be gauge-invariant. Here, we propose how to identify the gauge-invariant part of the metric perturbation and the six independent gauge invariants \textit{per~se} for an arbitrary background metric. For the Minkowski background, the operator that projects the metric perturbation on the invariant subspace is proportional to the well-known dispersion operator of linear gravitational waves in~vacuum. For a general background, this operator is expressed in terms of the Green's operator of the vacuum wave equation. If the background is smooth, it can be found asymptotically using the inverse scale of the background metric as a small parameter.