Gravitational waves and conformal time transformations

Recent interest in the "memory effect " prompted us to re-visit the relation of gravitational waves to oscillators. 50 years ago Niederer (1973) found that an isotropic harmonic oscillator with a constant frequency can be mapped onto a free particle. Later Takagi (1990) has shown that "time-dependent scaling'' extends the oscillator versus free particle correspondence to a time-dependent frequency when the scale factor satisfies a Sturm-Liouville equation. More recently Gibbons (0000) pointed out that time redefinition is conveniently studied in terms of the Schwarzian derivative. The oscillator versus free particle correspondence "Eisenhart-Duval lifts " to a conformal transformation between Bargmann spaces (Eisenhart, 1928; Duval et al., 1985; Duval et al., 1991; Cariglia et al., 2016). These methods are extended to spacetimes which are not conformally flat and have a time-dependent profile, and can then be applied to the geodesic motion in a plane gravitational wave. (C) 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.