Comparing Electromagnetic and Gravitational Radiation

Chatterjee, Deep (2015) Comparing Electromagnetic and Gravitational Radiation. Masters thesis, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata.

PDF (MS dissertation of Deep Chatterjee (10MS18)) Deep_Chatterjee_10MS18.pdf - Submitted Version Restricted to Repository staff only Download (464kB)

Abstract

While the subject of Electromagnetism is more than two centuries old now, General Relativity (GR) is just about to reach its centenary. There are similarities between the phenomenon of the long studied subject of Classical Electromagnetic Radiation and relatively recent Gravitational Radiation. Both the theories are relativistically covariant, yet they have remarkable difference when looked into deeply. Just like the classical electron spews out radiation and finally collapses into the central atomic nucleus in a classical atom, an accelerating mass emits Gravitational Waves (GWs) which carry energy away from the system. However, the fact that geometry of spacetime is affected by Gravity makes GWs richer. Our aim here is to compare the two, apparently similar, but very different cases of radiation. Electromagnetic waves are caused by the dynamics of electric and magnetic fields due to charges and are determined by a vector - the four potential, while gravitational waves are wave like solution of spacetime and is described by a tensor - the metric, the ruler with which one measures length in space-time. The primary focus of this project is to study the formalism required to deal with radiating systems and apply the results to determine the decay of the constants of motion for motion in a Kepler orbit. The techniques are also applied to a special case of motion in a point electric-dipole potential. The stable orbit is studied and the effects of radiation is looked into. This is expected to be the only new result in the report.

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