Raychaudhuri Equation and Weyl-Driven Shear: A Weak-Field Approach to Lensing and Gravitational Waves
Madhukrishna Chakraborty, Subenoy Chakraborty
Abstract
The letter studies phenomena like gravitational wave propagation and gravitational lensing using the celebrated Raychaudhuri equation (RE) in the weak field limit. Newtonian analogue of Relativistic RE has been explored. In doing so, role of shear has been found to be extremely important in explaining these phenomena. Consequently, the RE for shear has been used in course of the study and importance of Weyl curvature tensor in lensing and gravity wave propagation has been explicitly shown using a damped harmonic oscillator approach.