Plane fronted gravitational waves in Lovelock-Yang-Mills theory

TL;DR

This paper derives plane fronted gravitational wave solutions in Lovelock gravity across arbitrary dimensions, including pure gravity, Lovelock-Yang-Mills, and special cases like Lovelock-Maxwell and pp-waves, with analysis of degenerate theories.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive derivation of PFGWs in Lovelock gravity of any order and explores their properties in various coupled field scenarios.

Findings

Lovelock-Yang-Mills PFGWs are explicitly constructed.

Pure gravity and Lovelock-Maxwell solutions are recovered as special cases.

Degenerate Lovelock theories exhibit unique solution features.

Abstract

We obtain plane fronted gravitational waves (PFGWs) in arbitrary dimension in Lovelock gravity, to any order in the Riemann tensor. We exhibit pure gravity as well as Lovelock-Yang-Mills PFGWs. Lovelock-Maxwell and $pp$ waves arise as particular cases. The electrovac solutions trivially satisfy the Lovelock-Born-Infeld field equations. The peculiarities that arise in degenerate Lovelock theories are also analyzed.