Talk:Monochromatic electromagnetic plane wave
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[edit] New Article
I have created this article to describe an exact solution validating the beautiful discussion in the textbook by Misner, Thorne and Wheeler. (Yes, I need a reference to a published paper discussing it. Any suggestions?) This is still a work in progress-- I plan to add figures illustrating the behavior of the various "physical" components (EM energy density, expansion tensor, curvature tensors), plus a discussion (with a figure) of the remarkable appearance of the light cones in the Brinkmann chart, which validates the insight of Penrose in his discussion of a "pulse wave". And I plan to add some discussion explaining clearly and simply (I hope) how this exact solution relates to a well known solution in weak-field theory. Hopefully this will happen tommorrow.
I also plan to write, as soon as I can find time, the other articles implicitly promised in my article on pp-wave spacetimes.
For anyone who has been following the development of my planned article on plane wave spacetimes, when I tried to write that according to my original conception, I saw this wouldn't work. So I have a new plan: to keep that article short, and basically direct the reader back to the pp-wave article, where there is already a unified discussion, and to have the pp-wave article link out to smaller articles on various exact solutions.
Yes, it has occurred to me that developing a "gtr exact solution template" (with boxed data) might be a good idea, since I anticipate that some might feel the existing version of this article is too technical. I plan to look into that, and if I do create such a template, I plan to rewrite any articles on exact solutions I may have written in the mean time to use the box to hold much of the formulae involved in the definition and analysis of the solution (eg. frame, line element, components wrt the frame of expansion/vorticity, Bel decomposition). It also occurs to me that a nice feature of such a template would be a link out of wikiworld to the GRTensorII on-line Java form, which will allow the reader to easily enter a metric or frame and to verify my computations! Very handy for mathematical proof-reading by an army of millions, give or take a dozen orders of magnitude.
