General relativistic elasticity : statics and dynamics of spherically symmetric metrics

Abstract

An introduction is provided to the theory of elasticity in general relativity. Important tensors appearing in this context are presented. In particular, attention is focussed on the elasticity difference tensor, for which an algebraic analysis is performed. Applications are given to static and non-static spherically symmetric configurations. For the latter, dynamical equations are obtained characterizing the space-time in the context of general relativistic elasticity.