GRG Editor's Choice: The magnetic part of the Weyl tensor, and the expansion of discrete universes

Clifton, T., Gregoris, D. & Rosquist, K., The magnetic part of the Weyl tensor, and the expansion of discrete universes, Gen Relativ Gravit (2017) 49: 30. doi:10.1007/s10714-017-2192-0

Open Access | Editor's Choice (Research Article)

First Online: 27 January 2017

In each volume of GRG, a few papers are marked as “Editor’s Choice”. The primary criteria is original, high quality research that is of wide interest within the community.

Abstract:

We examine the effect that the magnetic part of the Weyl tensor has on the large-scale expansion of space. This is done within the context of a class of cosmological models that contain regularly arranged discrete masses, rather than a continuous perfect fluid. The natural set of geodesic curves that one should use to consider the cosmological expansion of these models requires the existence of a non-zero magnetic part of the Weyl tensor. We include this object in the evolution equations of these models by performing a Taylor series expansion about a hypersurface where it initially vanishes. At the same cosmological time, measured as a fraction of the age of the universe, we find that the influence of the magnetic part of the Weyl tensor increases as the number of masses in the universe is increased. We also find that the influence of the magnetic part of the Weyl tensor increases with time, relative to the leading-order electric part, so that its contribution to the scale of the universe can reach values of ∼1%, before the Taylor series approximation starts to break down.