Particle motion in weak relativistic gravitational fields

Abstract

We derive the geodesic equation of motion in the presence of weak gravitational fields produced by relativistic sources such as cosmic strings, decomposed into scalar, vector and tensor parts. We find that the vector (gravito-magnetic) force is an important contributor, and for non-relativistic particles we recover the well-known result for the impulse from a moving straight string. Our results can be straightforwardly incorporated into N-body simulations to allow for the presence of cosmic defects or other sources of weak gravitational fields.