Dirac particles in a gravitational shock wave

Abstract

Using the Newman-Penrose formalism we calculate the positive energy momentum eigenstates of the Dirac equation for a plane polarized gravitational wave pulse. We then consider Dirac particles whose spins are polarized in each orthonormal coordinate direction prior to the arrival of the gravitational wave pulse, and determine how the spins are changed by the pulse after its departure.

Global propagation of massive quantum fields in the plane gravitational waves and electromagnetic backgrounds

“…with the special compact supports) plane sandwich waves. Similar results, for massive spin one-half particles but only for linearly polarized sandwiches, were obtained in [10] (see also [11]). Although the plane gravitational waves are relatively simple they exhibit some surprising properties, e.g.…”

“…As we noted above the classical motion in gravitational (electromagnetic) fields (4.1) and (4.2) is explicitly solvable. Namely, for g (1) , the solution of geodesic equations, in the transverse directions 11 , for a < ǫ 2 , is given by…”

“…Such an approach was applied (in the Newman-Penrose framework) in Ref. [11] to linearly polarized sandwich wave; here we study this problem, in a slightly different way, for the general plane sandwich wave (for example, one can take the pulses studied in Ref. [60]).…”

“…5 we consider all above issues for the spin one-half particle; moreover, we discus the change of the spin polarization after the passage of the general sandwich wave (for standard linearly polarized sandwich waves this fact was discussed, by means of the Newman-Penrose framework, in Ref. [11]). Collusions and possible further directions of investigations are presented in Sec.…”

Spinning particles in twisted gravitational wave spacetimes

“…Dynamics of classical spinning test particles have been studied in the field of weak gravitational plane waves by a number of authors, see Refs. [29,30] and the references cited therein. We discuss this problem below for twisted waves and compare the result with the case of plane waves.…”