Photon frequency conversion induced by gravitational radiation

Abstract

We consider propagation of gravitational radiation in a magnetized multicomponent plasma. It is shown that large density perturbations can be generated, even for small deviations from flat space, provided the cyclotron frequency is much larger than the plasma frequency. Furthermore, the induced density gradients can generate frequency conversion of electromagnetic radiation, which may give rise to indirect observational effect of the gravitational waves.

Harmonic generation of gravitational wave induced Alfvén waves

“…In contrast to Refs. [3,10] we will here concentrate on the evolution of the Alfvén waves at a distance further from the gravitational source, where the Alfvén-GW coupling is of less importance, and the GW source terms for the Alfvén waves can be neglected. Thus from now on we will assume the perturbations to be of the form ψ ≈ ψ(z − V A t), where…”

“…[3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10] the authors have studied nonlinear responses to the gravitational wave by the plasma medium, although the backreaction has been neglected. The nonlinear response gives raise to effects such as parametric instabilities [5,6,7,8], large density fluctuations [3,9], photon acceleration [3] and wave collapse [10]. The application of gravitational wave processes to astrophysics has been discussed by for example Refs.…”

The Electromagnetic Signature of Black Hole Ring‐Down

“…This is where the photon frequency conversion (Marklund et al 2000;Brodin et al 2001;Servin & Brodin 2003) could come into play, overcoming this by increasing the frequency to detectable levels. An important extension of this work, therefore, will be to include a plasma into this situation; we leave this to later, and concentrate here on setting up a suitable formalism for the inclusion of a plasma while investigating the pure curvature effects of the BH, which turn out to be quite large.…”

Generation of gravitational radiation in dusty plasmas and supernovae

“…In some cases, the emphasis is on the basic theory [5,6,7,8,9,10]. In other works, the focus is on GW detectors [11,12,13], on cosmology [14,15,16], or on astrophysical applications such as binary mergers [17], gamma ray bursts [18] or pulsars [19]. Many of the previous works have concentrated on the conversion from GWs to electromagnetic waves, which can be analysed within a test matter approach which neglects the back reaction on the gravitational field.…”

“…The growth rate of our nonlinear process is estimated, and the results are discussed in the context of the gravitational radiation accompanying supernova explosions. It is well known that there exist numerous mechanisms for the conversion between gravitational waves (GWs) and electromagnetic waves [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19]. For example, the propagation of GWs across an external magnetic field gives rise to a linear coupling to the electromagnetic field [1] , which may lead to the gravitational wave excitation of ordinary electromagnetic waves in vacuum, or of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) waves in a plasma [2,3,4].…”