Behavior of zero rest-mass fields including gravitation in the vicinity of zeros

✍ Scribed by J Audretsch

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1973
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 593 KB
• Volume: 78
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0003-4916
• DOI: 10.1016/0003-4916(73)90011-0

✦ Synopsis

For free nonradiation zero rest-mass fields, as for example the nonnull Maxwell and the Weyl tensor fields in vacuum, a uniform treatment of the behavior of the principal null vectors in the vicinity of boundary zeros is given. It is shown that a boundary zero of a field is a singular point of at least one of its principal null vectors. In the special case of a Maxwell field for which the Poynting three-vector vanishes for a certain observer-field, a boundary zero of the Maxwell field is a singular point of the corresponding electric and magnetic fields. The results are valid in flat and curved spacetimes independently of whether the zero rest-mass fields act as source of the spacetime curvature or not.