Curvature properties of (t−z)-type plane wave metric

Abstract The objective, in this paper, is to obtain the curvature properties of ( t − z ) -type plane wave metric studied by Bondi et al. 1959. For this a general ( t − z ) -type wave metric is considered and the condition for which it obeys Einstein’s empty spacetime field equations is obtained. It is found that the rank of the Ricci tensor of ( t − z ) -type plane wave metric is 1 and is of Codazzi type. Also it is proved that it is not recurrent but Ricci recurrent, conformally recurrent and hyper generalized recurrent. Moreover, it is semisymmetric and satisfies the Ricci generalized pseudosymmetric type condition P ⋅ P = − 1 3 Q ( R i c , P ) . It is interesting to note that, physically, the energy momentum tensor describes a radiation field with parallel rays and geometrically it is a Codazzi tensor and semisymmetric. As special case, the geometric structures of Taub’s plane symmetric spacetime metric are deduced. Comparisons between ( t − z ) -type plane wave metric and pp-wave metric with respect to their geometric structures are viewed.