Gravitational and torsion waves in linearised teleparallel gravity

TL;DR

This paper explores gravitational and torsion waves in linearised teleparallel gravity, proposing a gedanken experiment to estimate Earth's contortion using gravitational wave data, aligning with previous findings.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to detect and quantify torsion in teleparallel gravity through gravitational wave interactions and proposes an experimental setup for such measurements.

Findings

Contortion waves generated by skew-symmetric tensors.

Gravitational waves from symmetric contortion perturb flat spacetime.

Estimated Earth's contortion matches previous results.

Abstract

Spin-2, spin-1 and spin-0 modes in linearised teleparallelism are obtained where the totally skew-symmetric complex contortion tensor generates scalar torsion waves and the symmetric contortion in the last two indices generates gravitational waves as gravitational perturbations of flat spacetime with contortion tensor. A gedanken experiment with this gravitational-torsion wave hitting a ring of spinless particles is proposed which allows us to estimate the contortion of the Earth by making use of data from LISA GW detector. This value coincides with previous value obtained by Nitsch in teleparallelism using another type of experiment.