Multipole expansions for energy and momenta carried by gravitational waves

Abstract

We present expressions for the energy, linear momentum and angular momentum carried away from an isolated system by gravitational radiation based on spin-weighted spherical harmonics decomposition of the Weyl scalar $\Psi_4$. We also show that the expressions derived are equivalent to the common expressions obtained when using a framework based on perturbations of a Schwazschild background. The main idea is to collect together all the different expressions in a uniform and consistent way. The formulae presented here are directly applicable to the calculation of the radiated energy, linear momentum and angular momentum starting from the gravitational waveforms which are typically extracted from numerical simulations.