Gravitational wave memory and its tail in cosmology

Abstract

We study gravitational wave memory effect in the FRW cosmological model with matter and cosmological constant. Since the background is curved, gravitational radiation develops a tail part arriving after the main signal that travels along the past light cone of the observer. First we discuss first order gravitational wave sourced by a binary system, and find that the tail only gives a negligible memory, in accord with previous results. Then we study the nonlinear memory effect coming from induced gravitational radiation sourced by first order gravitational radiation propagating over cosmological distances. In the light cone part of the induced gravitational wave we find a novel term missed in previous studies of the cosmological memory effect. Furthermore, we show that the induced gravitational wave has a tail part that slowly accumulates after the light cone part has passed and grows to a sizeable magnitude over a cosmological timescale. This tail part of the memory effect will be a new component in the stochastic gravitational wave background.

51 pages, 15 figures; v2: references added, typos corrected, a couple of explanatory comments in Sec. 4.1 added, argument in Sec. 4.3 revised, published version

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• Cosmological memory effect in scalar-tensor theories
• Gravitational Wave Memory Imprints on the CMB from Populations of Massive Black Hole Mergers
• Inflationary gravitational wave background as a tail effect
• On the Gravitational Precession Memory Effect for an Ensemble of Gyroscopes
• Modeling the BMS transformation induced by a binary black hole merger
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