Gravitational Radiation in the Weak-Field Limit

[Alexrey]

Hey guys,

I'm currently doing my 4th year (honours year where I come from) in mathematics and am required to do a year long research project. I chose to do mine on the generation and propagation of gravitational radiation in the weak-field limit. So far I have quite a few good resources which include Gravitation and Cosmology (Weinberg), Gravitation (Misner, Thorne and Wheeler), A Short Course in General Relativity (Foster and Nightingale) and some lecture notes that I found online that were created by Carroll, but I was hoping that there might be some good additional resources out there that will help in my understanding. What I'm looking for are notes that don't skip too many steps when explaining concepts, as most of my current resources will sometimes skip big chunks which I'll then have to try and figure out myself, and could take hours to do.

Any help would be appreciated, thanks guys!

 

[nicksauce]

You might like Gravitational Waves by Maggoire.

 

[TSny]

You might find the book Introduction to General Relativity by John Walecka (2007) to be helpful. Most calculations are shown in quite a bit of detail and there is a chapter on gravitational radiation. At Amazon you can find used copies for under $15.

 

[Alexrey]

Thanks guys, I'll see if my university's physics or maths libraries have those books.

 

[Alexrey]

I have a question: With all the billions of celestial bodies out there generating g-waves (binary stars, coalescing black holes etc.) wouldn't there be a huge amount of minuscule space-time ripples from each of these sources that are propagating throughout the universe and interacting with one another? If so would it not be possible for enough waves to interact and create quite a large amount of constructive interference in places thereby allowing us to detect them? I know that the universe is vast, so "in places" is an extreme form of generalization, but with so many waves interacting with one another surely some detectors would be able to pick up this constructive interference, therefore requiring less sensitive equipment than would be needed for detecting a single wave? I haven't read too much into detection methods so far, so this might be what they are doing anyway, but it's just something I had on my mind.