Boosted static multipole particles as sources of impulsive gravitational waves

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how impulsive gravitational waves from null particles with multipole structures can be derived by boosting static Weyl solutions in Minkowski space, and discusses extending this to (anti-) de Sitter backgrounds.

Contribution

It shows a method to generate impulsive gravitational wave solutions from static multipole sources via boosting in Minkowski space and explores potential extensions to curved backgrounds.

Findings

Impulsive wave solutions can be obtained by boosting static multipole sources.

Extension of boosting method to (anti-) de Sitter backgrounds is discussed.

Exact solutions in curved backgrounds remain to be found.

Abstract

It is shown that the known solutions for nonexpanding impulsive gravitational waves generated by null particles of arbitrary multipole structure can be obtained by boosting the Weyl solutions describing static sources with arbitrary multipole moments, at least in a Minkowski background. We also discuss the possibility of boosting static sources in (anti-) de Sitter backgrounds, for which exact solutions are not known, to obtain the known solutions for null multipole particles in these backgrounds.