Gravitational collapse of a cylindrical null shell in vacuum

Abstract

Barrabès-Israel null shell formalism is used to study the gravitational collapse of a thin cylindrical null shell in vacuum. In general the lightlike matter shell whose history coincides with a null hypersurface is characterized by a surface energy density. In addition, a gravitational impulsive wave is present on this null hypersurface whose generators admit both the shear and expansion. In the case of imposing the cylindrical flatness the surface energy-momentum tensor of the matter shell on the null hypersurface vanishes and the null hyper- surface is just the history of the gravitational wave .

Keywords

• general relativity
• null shell
• gravitational waves