Cosmological absorption of gravitational waves

Abstract

SEVERAL people have investigated the absorption of electromagnetic and neutrino waves in cosmological models and discussed the self-consistency or otherwise, in the Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory of radiation, of retarded and advanced fields; a solution of the field equations is self-consistent if the absorption tends to completeness as the field propagates. Cosmological absorption of gravitational waves has been treated briefly by Hawking¹. Here, the completeness or otherwise of the absorption of retarded and advanced gravitational waves will be investigated using a technique introduced, in the case of electromagnetic absorption, by Davies²; the technique applies to the Robertson–Walker cosmologies of arbitrary spatial curvature.