Polarization modes for strong-field gravitational waves

Understand

Strong-field gravitational plane waves are often represented in either the Rosen or Brinkmann forms.

• These forms are related by a coordinate transformation, so they should describe essentially the same physics, but the two forms treat polarization states quite differently.
• Both deal well with linear polarizations, but there is a qualitative difference in the way they deal with circular, elliptic, and more general polarization states.
• In this article we will describe a general algorithm for constructing arbitrary polarization states in the Rosen form.