Cut-and-paste for impulsive gravitational waves with $$\Lambda $$: the mathematical analysis

Abstract

Impulsive gravitational waves are theoretical models of short but violent bursts of gravitational radiation. They are commonly described by two distinct spacetime metrics, one of local Lipschitz regularity and the other one even distributional. These two metrics are thought to be ‘physically equivalent’ since they can be formally related by a ‘discontinuous coordinate transformation’. In this paper we provide a mathematical analysis of this issue for the entire class of nonexpanding impulsive gravitational waves propagating in a background spacetime of constant curvature. We devise a natural geometric regularisation procedure to show that the notorious change of variables arises as the distributional limit of a family of smooth coordinate transformations. In other words, we establish that both spacetimes arise as distributional limits of a smooth sandwich wave taken in different coordinate systems which are diffeomorphically related.