A rigorous solution concept for geodesic and geodesic deviation equations in impulsive gravitational waves

Abstract

The geodesic as well as the geodesic deviation equation for impulsive gravitational waves involve highly singular products of distributions (\theta\de, \theta^2\de, \de^2). A solution concept for these equations based on embedding the distributional metric into the Colombeau algebra of generalized functions is presented. Using a universal regularization procedure we prove existence and uniqueness results and calculate the distributional limits of these solutions explicitly. The obtained limits are regularization independent and display the physically expected behavior.Comment: RevTeX, 9 pages, final version (minor corrections, references added