Homothetic Congruences in General Relativity

Abstract

The kinematical characteristics of distinct infalling homothetic fields are discussed by specifying the transverse subspace of their generated congruences to the energy-momentum deposit of the chosen gravitational system. This is pursued through the inclusion of the base manifold's cotangent bundle in a generalized Raychaudhuri equation and its kinematical expressions. Exploiting an electromagnetic energy-momentum tensor as the source of non-gravitational effects, I investigate the evolution of the mentioned homothetic congruences, as they fall onto a Reissner-Nordstrom black hole. The results show remarkable differences to the common expectations from infalling congruences of massive particles.