Hereditary Effects and New Optical Properties of Nonlinear Gravitational Waves

TL;DR

This paper explores hereditary effects in nonlinear gravitational waves, revealing their impact on wave amplitude decay, nonlocal dependencies, and potential for extracting detailed source information through optical effects.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of hereditary effects influencing nonlinear gravitational waves and demonstrates how these effects enable richer information extraction from waveforms.

Findings

Hereditary effects cause nonlinear gravitational wave amplitudes to decay more slowly.

Nonlinear perturbations depend nonlocally on linear ones due to hereditary effects.

Waveform analysis can reveal source distance, direction, and polarization.

Abstract

We investigate new optical effects of nonlinear gravitational waves that arise from hereditary effects. Firstly, we show that the amplitude of continuous plane waves has a hereditary effect that grows with distance. This can make the amplitude of nonlinear gravitational waves decay more slowly with distance. This will also lead to observable nonlinear effects in future observations. Secondly, hereditary effects also imply that nonlinear perturbations are nonlocally dependent on linear ones, and this property leads to some special optical effects which allow nonlinear gravitational waves to contain more information. It is even possible to extract information on the distance and direction of the wave source as well as the polarization from the waveform of nonlinear gravitational waves.