Fermi coordinates and Penrose limits

We propose a formulation of the Penrose plane wave limit in terms of null Fermi coordinates. This provides a physically intuitive ( Fermi coordinates are direct measures of geodesic distance in spacetime) and manifestly covariant description of the expansion around the plane wave metric in terms of components of the curvature tensor of the original metric, and generalizes the covariant description of the lowest order Penrose limit metric itself, obtained in Blau et al ( 2004 Class. Quantum Grav. 21 L43-9). We describe in some detail the construction of null Fermi coordinates and the corresponding expansion of the metric, and then study various aspects of the higher order corrections to the Penrose limit. In particular, we observe that in general the first-order corrected metric is such that it admits a light-cone gauge description in string theory. We also establish a formal analogue of the Weyl tensor peeling theorem for the Penrose limit expansion in any dimension, and we give a simple derivation of the leading ( quadratic) corrections to the Penrose limit of AdS(5) x S-5.