Gravitational wave memory and its tail in cosmology

TL;DR

This paper investigates the gravitational wave memory effect in a cosmological setting, revealing a new tail component that accumulates over time and impacts the stochastic gravitational wave background.

Contribution

It introduces a novel tail term in the nonlinear gravitational wave memory effect in cosmology, previously overlooked in studies.

Findings

The tail effect is negligible for first order gravitational waves from binaries.

A new tail term in the nonlinear memory effect is identified.

The tail grows over cosmological timescales, influencing the gravitational wave background.

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.