Soft Gravitons & the Memory Effect for Plane Gravitational Waves
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
2017-10-02 v4 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
High Energy Physics - Theory
Abstract
The "gravitational memory effect" due to an exact plane wave provides us with an elementary description of the diffeomorphisms associated with soft gravitons. It is explained how the presence of the latter may be detected by observing the motion of freely falling particles or other forms of gravitational wave detection. Numerical calculations confirm the relevance of the first, second and third time integrals of the Riemann tensor pointed out earlier. Solutions for various profiles are constructed. It is also shown how to extend our treatment to Einstein-Maxwell plane waves and a midi-superspace quantization is given.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1705.01378,
title = {Soft Gravitons & the Memory Effect for Plane Gravitational Waves},
author = {P. -M. Zhang and C. Duval and G. W. Gibbons and P. A. Horvathy},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.01378},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
40 pages, many figures. Matches published version