Radiation gauge in general relativity

A new radiation gauge for general relativity is presented. In analogy to the radiation (or Coulomb) gauge for electrodynamics, it leads to spatially covariant elliptic equations for the four gauge variables $g^{0\mu }$ of the spacetime metric. The radiation gauge conditions include as special cases maximal or hyperboloid time slicing and minimal distortion shift vectors. For the linearized theory, our gauge conditions reduce to those of Arnowitt, Deser, and Misner and of Dirac; however, our gauge is equally useful for strong time-dependent gravitational fields. An extensive discussion of appropriate asymptotic boundary conditions is given. Finally, our gauge is compared to and contrasted with the de Donder or harmonic gauge.