Quantum imprints of gravitational shockwaves

Abstract

Gravitational shockwaves are simple exact solutions of Einstein equations representing the fields of ultrarelativistic sources and idealized gravitational waves (shocks). Historically, much work has focused on shockwaves in the context of possible black hole formation in high energy particle collisions, yet they remain at the forefront of research even today. Representing hard modes in the bulk, shocks give rise to the gravitational memory effect at the classical level and implant supertranslation (BMS) hair onto a classical spacetime at the quantum level. The aim of this paper is to further our understanding of the `information content' of such supertranslations. Namely, we show that, contrary to the several claims in the literature, a gravitational shockwave does leave a quantum imprint on the vacuum state of a test quantum field and that this imprint is accessible to local observers carrying Unruh--DeWitt (UDW) detectors in this spacetime.

30 pages, 2 Appendices, 6 Figures; v2 minor typos corrected and updated references

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• Examination of a simple example of gravitational wave memory
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• Thermalization of particle detectors: The Unruh effect and its reverse
• Infinite towers of supertranslation and superrotation memories
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• Invariance of Unruh and Hawking radiation under matter-induced supertranslations
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• Entanglement harvesting of three Unruh-DeWitt detectors
• Non-perturbative simple-generated interactions with a quantum field for arbitrary Gaussian states
• Mutual information harvested by uniformly accelerated particle detectors
• Fisher Information of a Black Hole Spacetime
• Extraction of entanglement from quantum fields with entangled particle detectors
• Modest holography and bulk reconstruction in asymptotically flat spacetimes