Gravitational memory, BMS supertranslations and soft theorems

By Andrew Strominger, A. Zhiboedov. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2014

641 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The transit of a gravitating radiation pulse past arrays of detectors stationed near future null infinity in the vacuum is considered. It is shown that the relative positions and clock times of the detectors before and after the radiation transit differ by a BMS supertranslation. An explicit expression for the supertranslation in terms of moments of the radiation energy flux is given. The relative spatial displacement found for a pair of nearby detectors reproduces the well-known and potentially measurable gravitational memory effect. The displacement memory formula is shown to be equivalent to Weinberg’s formula for soft graviton production.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6eaeb414f7670b4a0c6302805ac9162e5200543b

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Citations in the corpus

Superrotation charge and supertranslation hair on black holes (2016, background): “Indeed, proposed tests of the gravitational memory effect, although not initially recognized as such, are tests of supertranslation charge conservation [17].”
Soft Hair on Black Holes. (2016, methodology): “Although originating in a different context these observations do provide, as discussed in [9, 10], a priori reasons to doubt the ‘unquestionable’ assumptions underlying the information paradox: (i) The vacuum in quantum gravity is not unique.”
Lectures on celestial amplitudes (2021, background): “The fact that there were also corresponding physical observables added the third vertex to what became known as the IR triangle [40,42,78].”
Higher-Dimensional Supertranslations and Weinberg's Soft Graviton Theorem (2015, background): “Moreover, it has been shown [23] that the gravitational memory effect [24–26], which occurs in the deep infrared, provides direct and measurable consequences of BMS symmetry.”
Flat holography: aspects of the dual field theory (2016, background): “The memory effect is connected to the soft theorems by Fourier transforms (in time) [12].”
Superboost transitions, refraction memory and super-Lorentz charge algebra (2018, background): “6) can be reexpressed as the differential equation determining the difference between the supertranslation field ∆C “ C` ́ C ́ between initial and final retarded times after assuming suitable fall-off conditions [5] ́ 4 DpD ` 2q∆C “ ∆M ` ż u` u ́ du Tuu (4.”
Holographic symmetry algebras for gauge theory and gravity (2021, methodology): “These comprise a subgroup of the symmetries considered by BMS and can be measured using the gravitational memory effect [5].”
New gravitational memories (2015, background): “The complete equivalence of the soft graviton and displacement memory formulae was demonstrated in [14].”
Lectures on the Infrared Structure of Gravity and Gauge Theory (2017, methodology): “Perhaps the simplest is the connection between the soft theorem and the memory effect [41].”