Interaction between linear polarized plane gravitational waves and a plane electromagnetic wave in the electromagnetic-gravity analogue

Abstract

We study the interaction among gravitational and electromagnetic plane waves by means of an analogue electromagnetic model of gravity, where the gravitational properties are encoded in the electromagnetic properties of a material in flat space-time. In this setup, the variations in the metric tensor produced by the gravitational waves are codified as space-time-varying electromagnetic properties. We used an in-housed code based in the finite-difference time domain method to conduct numerical experiments, where we found that, when a monochromatic gravitational plane wave interacts with a narrow-band electromagnetic plane wave, an infinite number of sidebands, equally separated between themselves, are induced by the gravitational wave. Finally, we discuss possible future applications of this effect as an alternative method to directly detect gravitational waves.