《Physical Interpretation of Vacuum Solutions of Einstein#39;s Equations II》.pdf

General Relativity and Gravitation, Vol. ~6, No. 7, 1994 Physical Interpretation of Vacuum Solutions of Einsteins Equations. Part II. Time-dependent solutionst W. B. Bonnor, 1 :I. B. Grifllths 2 and M. A. H. MaeCallum 1,s Received February 8, 1994 The study of interpretations of the vacuum solutions of Einsteins field equations is continued by considering some well known time-dependent solutions. Among these are metrics representing accelerating particles, cylindrical and plane waves and cosmological solutions. 1. I N T R O D U C T I O N This is the second of two review papers on the physical interpretation of exact solutions of Einsteins vacuum equations without cosmological con- stant. The first [1], hereafter referred to as I, dealt with static and station- ary solutions. This deals with time-dependent solutions. We emphasize that our interest here is in physical interpretation; for a mathematical treatise on exact solutions (up to 1980) see [2]. It will be noticed that cylindrically symmetric space-times (Section 3), colliding plane wave space-times (Section 6) and eosmologies with two commuting Killing vectors (Section 8) may all be represented by a metric of the form (15). The same form also applies to regions inside horizons of 1 School of Mathematical Sciences, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK 2 Department of Mathematical Sciences, Loughbomugh University of Technology, Loughborough, Leics. LEll 3TU, UK. E-mail: J.B.Griffiths@lut.ac.uk 3 F_~mail:M.A.H.