Geodesics in the Carroll limit
Summary
The focus of this thesis is the Carroll limit, the limit of vanishing speed of light. This can be thought of as the opposite of the Galilean (or Newtonian) limit, in which we take the limit of infinite speed of light. We look at taking this limit in the context of finding geodesics in general relativity, because there is not a lot of literature about this subject yet. Given a spacetime, we can take the Carroll limit in different stages of the process of finding geodesics, and it turns out that this will give us different, but similar, results for the existence of certain geodesics. All will be illustrated with examples in Minkowski, Schwarzschild, and de Sitter spacetime. The main result of this thesis is the Carroll limit of the geodesic equations being written down. We also found a non-trivial Carroll geodesic in the Schwarzschild spacetime, which shows that there can be moving particles in the Carroll limit in a non-flat spacetime.