Does a free falling charge radiate ?

[WannabeNewton]

This may be just nit-picking but I always thought geodesic deviation to be caused by tidal forces is there a straight forward way to relate GWs and tidal forces?

http://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/9712019.pdf
Go to, in particular, page 159 out of 238 in the pdf itself (not page 159 in the notes).

 

[TrickyDicky]

http://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/9712019.pdf
Go to, in particular, page 159 out of 238 in the pdf itself (not page 159 in the notes).

Thanks, pal. I had read those notes long ago but I think I skipped some bits.
But yes the bottom line is that gravitational waves induce a form of tidal effect on the test masses of the modified Michelson interferometer that is used in modern GWs detectors.

I think I'll start a new thread on GW detection, tidal forces and accelerometers in order not to go so much OT here.

 

[WannabeNewton]

I think I'll start a new thread on GW detection, tidal forces and accelerometers in order not to go so much OT here.

Yeah that would be cool. It is quite instructive to take a ring of test particles as your family of closely separated geodesics and see how the gravitational waves expand and shear them. There is a close relationship between the Weyl tensor as a contributor to shear and the Ricci tensor as a contributor to expansion, as codified by the Raychaudhuri equation (however they are coupled so it isn't exactly totally independent)