General Relativity

Catalog description

Review of special relativity. Tensor analysis. Differential forms and manifolds. Geodesics and curvature two-forms. The metric tensor. The stress-energy tensor and the Einstein equations. The initial data problem. The Schwarzschild and Kerr solutions: classical black holes. Elementary relativistic cosmology. Generation and detection of gravitational waves. Experimental tests of general relativity: the PPN formalism. Global techniques and the Hawking-Penrose singularity theorems. Hawking radiation and the Bekenstein bound.