The gravitational-wave memory effect
By Marc Favata. 2010
224 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The nonlinear memory effect is a slowly growing, non-oscillatory contribution to the gravitational-wave amplitude. It originates from gravitational waves that are sourced by the previously emitted waves. In an ideal gravitational-wave interferometer a gravitational wave with memory causes a permanent displacement of the test masses that persists after the wave has passed. Surprisingly, the nonlinear memory affects the signal amplitude starting at leading (Newtonian-quadrupole) order. Despite this fact, the nonlinear memory is not easily extracted from current numerical relativity simulations. After reviewing the linear and nonlinear memory I summarize some recent work, including (1) computations of the memory contribution to the inspiral waveform amplitude (thus completing the waveform to third post-Newtonian order); (2) the first calculations of the nonlinear memory that include all phases of binary black hole coalescence (inspiral, merger, ringdown); and (3) realistic estimates of the detectability of the memory with LISA.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Ocean Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0ebc235a94ea0882f982e43457837c29b906ee02
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
- Mark A. Scheel
- Lawrence E. Kidder
- Harald P. Pfeiffer
- Scott E. Field
- Jonathan Blackman
- V. Varma
- S. Burke-Spolaor
- S. Taylor
In Ocean Engineering
Citations in the corpus
- Surrogate model of hybridized numerical relativity binary black hole waveforms (2018, background): “There are several possible reasons for this [90]: (1) The NR waveform does not have the correct “memory” contribution since this depends on the entire history of the system starting at t 1⁄4 −∞, while the NR simulation covers only the last few orbits.”
- The astrophysics of nanohertz gravitational waves (2018, background): “That offset, which grows over the entire past history of the binary’s evolution, but most precipitously during the coalescence, is the non-oscillatory term we callmemory (Braginskii and Thorne 1987; Christodoulou 1991; Favata 2010; Thorne 1992; Zel’dovich and Polnarev 1974).”