2004/05/17 by Joachim Moortgat, J. Kuijpers, Jan Kuijpers · 1 citation
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · #High-pressure geophysics and materials #Magnetic confinement fusion research #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #astro-ph #gr-qc
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.70.023001
published as Phys.Rev. D70 (2004) 023001 · 12 pages, 5 figures; Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. D
arxiv created 2004/05/17 · openalex publication_date 2004/07/15 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
We study the propagation of gravitational waves (GW's) in a uniformly magnetized plasma at arbitrary angles to the magnetic field. No a priori assumptions are made about the temperature, and we consider both a plasma at rest and a plasma flowing out at ultrarelativistic velocities. In the 3+1 orthonormal tetrad description, we find that all three fundamental low-frequency plasma wave modes are excited by the GW's. Alfv'en waves are excited by a \ifmmode×\else\texttimes\fi polarized GW, whereas the slow and fast magnetoacoustic modes couple to the + polarization. The slow mode, however, does not interact coherently with the GW. The most relevant wave mode is the fast magnetoacoustic mode which in a strongly magnetized plasma has a vanishingly small phase lag with respect to the GW allowing for coherent interaction over large length scales. When the background magnetic field is almost, but not entirely, parallel to the GW's direction of propagation even the Alfv'en waves grow to first order in the GW amplitude. Finally, we calculate the growth of the magnetoacoustic waves and the damping of the GW.