English

Displacement within velocity effect in gravitational wave memory

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2025-05-14 v4 High Energy Physics - Theory Mathematical Physics math.MP

Abstract

Particles initially at rest hit by a passing sandwich gravitational wave exhibit, in general, thevelocity memory effect (VM): they fly apart with constant velocity. For specific values of the wave parameters their motion can however become pure displacement (DM) as suggested by Zel'dovich and Polnarev. For such a ``miraculous'' value, the particle trajectory is composed of an integer number of (approximate) standing half-waves. Our statements are illustrated numerically by a Gaussian, and analytically by the P\"oschl-Teller profiles.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2405.12928,
  title  = {Displacement within velocity effect in gravitational wave memory},
  author = {P. -M. Zhang and P. A. Horvathy},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.12928},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

affiliation corrected

R2 v1 2026-06-28T16:34:32.170Z