Gravitational Radiation in the Limit of High Frequency. II. Nonlinear Terms and the Effective Stress Tensor

The high-frequency expansion of a vacuum gravitational field in powers of its small wavelength is continued. We go beyond the previously discussed linearization of the field equations to consider the lowest-order nonlinearities. These are shown to provide a natural, gauge-invariant, averaged stress tensor for the effective energy localized in the high-frequency gravitational waves. Under the assumption of the WKB form for the field, this stress tensor is found to have the same algebraic structure as that for an electromagnetic null field. A Poynting vector is used to investigate the flow of energy and momentum by gravitational waves, and it is seen that high-frequency waves propagate along null hypersurfaces and are not backscattered by the lowest-order nonlinearities. Expressions for the total energy and momentum carried by the field to flat null infinity are given in terms of coordinate-independent hypersurface integrals valid within regions of high field strength. The formalism is applied to the case of spherical gravitational waves where a news function is obtained and where the source is found to lose exactly the energy and momentum contained in the radiation field. Second-order terms in the metric are found to be finite and free of divergences of the (lnr) r variety.