Dynamics of Rotating Cylindrical Shells in General Relativity

Cylindrical spacetimes with rotation are studied using the Newmann–Penrose formulas. By studying null geodesic deviations, the physical meaning of each component of the Riemann tensor is given. These spacetimes are further extended to include rotating dynamic shells, and the general expression of the surface energy-momentum tensor of the shells is given in terms of the discontinuity of the first derivatives of the metric coefficients. As an application of the developed formulas, a stationary shell that generates the Lewis solutions, which represent the most general vacuum cylindrical solutions of the Einstein field equations with rotation, is studied by assuming that the spacetime inside the shell is flat. It is shown that the shell can satisfy all the energy conditions by properly choosing the parameters appearing in the model, provided that 0 ≤ σ ≤ 1, where σ is related to the mass per unit length of the shell. PACS numbers: 04.20Cv, 04.30.+x, 97.60.Sm, 97.60.Lf.