Speaker
Qiliang Zhao
Description
We investigate velocity and displacement memory in plane gravitational waves beyond the usual sandwich approximation. The central question is whether the memory observables remain meaningful when the wave profile is continuously decaying rather than compactly supported. We find that there is a critical inverse-square falloff: faster-decaying tails can preserve memory even when the outgoing motion is no longer strictly free, whereas inverse-square or slower tails destroy the standard memory observables. The inverse-cubic and inverse-square profiles illustrate these two possibilities, respectively.
| Topic | Gravitational wave theory |
|---|