The memory effect in impulsive plane waves: comments, corrections, clarifications

Abstract

Recently the 'memory effect' has been studied in plane gravitational waves and, in particular, in impulsive plane waves. Based on an analysis of the particle motion (mainly in Baldwin-Jeffery-Rosen coordinates) a 'velocity memory effect' is claimed to be found in [P.-M. Zhang, C. Duval, and P. A. Horvathy. Memory effect for impulsive gravitational waves. Classical Quantum Gravity, 35(6):065011, 20, 2018]. Here we point out a conceptual mistake in this account and employ earlier works to explain how to correctly derive the particle motion and how to correctly deal with the notorious distributional Brinkmann form of the metric and its relation to the continuous Rosen form.

arXiv commentIdentical to the version published as "Comment on 'Memory effect for impulsive gravitational waves'" in Class. Quantum Grav., 12 pages, LaTeX

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Memory Effect and BMS-like Symmetries for Impulsive Gravitational Waves
• Large Gauge Effects and the Structure of Amplitudes
• Cut-and-paste for impulsive gravitational waves with $\Lambda$: The geometric picture
• Memory Effect and Carroll Symmetry: 50 years later
• Penrose junction conditions with $\Lambda$: Geometric insights into low-regularity metrics for impulsive gravitational waves
• Gravitational wave memory and its effects on particles and fields
• Conformally related vacuum gravitational waves, and their symmetries
• Classical physics from amplitudes on curved backgrounds