Memory Effect for Particle Scattering in Odd Spacetime Dimensions

Understand

We investigate the gravitational memory effect for linearized perturbations off of Minkowski space in odd spacetime dimensions $d$ by examining the effects of gravitational radiation from classical point particle scattering.

• We also investigate analogous memory effects for electromagnetic and scalar radiation.
• We find that there is no gravitational memory effect in all odd dimensions.
• For scalar and electromagnetic fields, there is no memory effect for $d\geq 7$; for $d=3$ there is an infinite momentum memory effect, whereas for $d=5$ there is no momentum memory effect but the displacement of a test particle will grow unboundedly with time.