Geodesics for impulsive gravitational waves and the multiplication of distributions
Abstract
We consider particle trajectories in the gravitational field of an impulsive pp-wave. Due to the distributional character of the wave profile one inevitably encounters an ambiguous point value θ(0). We show that this ambiguity may be resolved by imposing covariant constancy of the square of the tangent. Our result is consistent with Colombeau's multiplication of distributions.
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