Inhomogeneous perturbations of plane-wave spacetimes

Abstract

Recently it was shown that the exact cosmological solutions known as the vacuum plane-wave solutions are late-time attractors for an open set of the spatially homogeneous Bianchi universes containing a non-inflationary $\gamma$-law perfect fluid. In this paper we study inhomogeneous perturbations of these plane-wave spacetimes. By using expansion-normalised scale-invariant variables we show that these solutions are unstable to generic inhomogeneous perturbations. The crucial observation for establishing this result is a divergence of the expansion-normalised frame variables which ultimately leads to unstable modes.