Abstract:
Impulsive gravitational waves were introduced by Penrose in the late 1960s and have been widely studied since. They are space times of low regularity described by either a Lipschitz continuous or even a distributional metric tensor. We will start the talk with a brief introduction to Lorentzian geometry and then introduce impulsive gravitational waves with focus on the continuous form of the metric. We will study its distributional Ricci curvature and apply the theory on synthetic timelike Ricci curvature bounds introduced by Cavalletti-Mondino. This is joint work with Andrea Mondino (Oxford) and Clemens Sämann (Vienna).