Characteristic formulation for metric $f(R)$ gravity

In recent years, the characteristic formulation of numerical relativity has found increasing use in the extraction of gravitational radiation from numerically generated spacetimes. In this paper, we formulate the characteristic initial value problem for $f(R)$ gravity. We consider, in particular, the vacuum field equations of Metric $f(R)$ gravity in the Jordan frame, without utilizing the dynamical equivalence with scalar-tensor theories. We present the full hierarchy of nonlinear hypersurface and evolution equations necessary for numerical implementation in both tensorial and eth forms. Furthermore, we specialize the resulting equations to situations where the spacetime is almost Minkowski and almost Schwarszchild using standard linearization techniques. We obtain analytic solutions for the dominant $\ell =2$ mode and show that they satisfy the concomitant constraints. These results are ideally suited as testbed solutions for numerical codes. Finally, we point out that the characteristic formulation can be used as a complementary analytic tool to the $1+1+2$ semitetrad formulation.