Conformally related vacuum gravitational waves, and their symmetries

Abstract

A special conformal transformation which carries a vacuum gravitational wave into another vacuum one is built by using M\"obius-redefined time. It can either transform a globally defined vacuum wave into a vacuum sandwich wave, or carry the gravitational wave into itself. The first type, illustrated by linearly and circularly polarized vacuum plane gravitational waves, permutes the symmetries and the geodesics. Our pp waves with conformal O(2,1) symmetry of the second type, which seem to ahve escaped attention so far, are anisotropic generalizations of the familiar inverse-square profile. An example inspired by molecular physics, for which the particle can escape, or perform periodic motion, or fall into the singularity is studied in detail.