Exact ghost-free bigravitational waves

We study the propagation of exact gravitational waves in the ghost-free bimetric theory. Our focus is on type-N spacetimes compatible with the cosmological constants provided by the bigravity interaction potential, and particularly in the single class known by allowing at least a Killing symmetry: the AdS waves. They have the advantage of being represented by a generalized Kerr-Schild transformation from AdS spacetime. This entails a notorious simplification in bigravity by allowing to straightforwardly compute any power of its interaction square root matrix, opening the door to explore physically meaningful exact configurations. For these exact gravitational waves the complex dynamical structure of bigravity decomposes into elementary exact massless or massive excitations propagating on AdS. We use a complexified formulation of the Euler-Darboux equations to provide for the first time the general solutions to the massive version of the Siklos equation which rules the resulting AdS-wave dynamics, using an integral representation originally due to Poisson. Inspired by this progress, we tackle the subtle problem of how matter couples to bigravity and, more concretely, if this occurs through a composite metric, which is hard to handle in a general setting. Surprisingly, the Kerr-Schild ansatz brings again a huge simplification in how the related energy-momentum tensors are calculated. This allows us to explicitly characterize AdS waves supported by either a massless free scalar field or a wavefront-homogeneous Maxwell field. Considering the most general allowed Maxwell source instead is a highly nontrivial task, which we accomplish by again exploiting the complexified Euler-Darboux description and taking advantage of the classical Riemann method. In fact, this eventually allows us to find the most general configurations for any matter source.