UC Davis

This thesis concerns the construction and analysis of a new family of exact general relativistic shock waves. The construction resolves the open problem of determining the expanding waves created behind a shock-wave explosion into a static isothermal spacetime with an inverse square density and pressure profile. The construction involves matching two self-similar families of solutions to the perfect fluid Einstein field equations across a spherical shock surface. The matching is accomplished in Schwarzschild coordinates where the shock waves appear one derivative less regular than they actually are. Separately, both families contain singularities, but as matched shock-wave solutions, they are singularity free. There was no guarantee ahead of time that the matching of the two families could be achieved within the regions where both families are nonsingular. Indeed, for pure radiation equations of state, the matching occurs very near the singular point of the interior expanding wave, and this makes the analysis quite delicate, both numerically and formally. It is for this reason the construction is accompanied by a novel existence proof in the pure radiation case. The analysis is extended to demonstrate Lax stability in the pure radiation case and provide a criterion for stability in all other cases. These shock-wave solutions represent an intriguing new mechanism in General Relativity for exhibiting accelerations in perturbed Friedmann spacetimes, analogous to the accelerations modelled by the cosmological constant in the Standard Model of Cosmology. However, unlike in the Standard Model of Cosmology, these shock-wave solutions solve the Einstein field equations in the absence of a cosmological constant, opening up the question of whether a purely mathematical mechanism could account for the cosmic acceleration observed today, rather than dark energy.