Strong Antigravity. Life in the Shock Wave

Abstract

Strong anti-gravity is the vanishing to all orders in Newton's constant of the net force between two massive particles at rest. We study this phenomenon and show that it occurs in any effective theory of gravity which is obtained from a higher-dimensional model by compactification on a manifold with flat directions. We find the exact solution of the Einstein equations in the presence of a point-like source of strong anti-gravity by dimensional reduction of what is a shock-wave solution in the higher-dimensional model. (Latex file, no macros, figures not included)