Nonlocal Gravity: Damping of Linearized Gravitational Waves

Understand

In nonlocal general relativity, linearized gravitational waves are damped as they propagate from the source to the receiver in the Minkowski vacuum.

• Nonlocal gravity is a generalization of Einstein's theory of gravitation in which nonlocality is due to the gravitational memory of past events.
• That nonlocal gravity is dissipative is demonstrated in this paper within certain approximation schemes.
• The gravitational memory drag leads to the decay of the amplitude of gravitational waves given by the exponential damping factor exp (-t/\tau), where $\tau$ depends on the kernel of nonlocal gravity.