Quantum imprints of gravitational shockwaves

Understand

Gravitational shockwaves are simple exact solutions of Einstein equations representing the fields of ultrarelativistic sources and idealized gravitational waves (shocks).

• Historically, much work has focused on shockwaves in the context of possible black hole formation in high energy particle collisions, yet they remain at the forefront of research even today.
• Representing hard modes in the bulk, shocks give rise to the gravitational memory effect at the classical level and implant supertranslation (BMS) hair onto a classical spacetime at the quantum level.
• The aim of this paper is to further our understanding of the `information content' of such supertranslations.