Detecting the gravitational wave memory effect with TianQin

Understand

The gravitational wave memory effect is a prediction of general relativity.

• The presence of memory effect in gravitational wave signals not only provides the chance to test an important aspect of general relativity, but also represents a potentially non-negligible contribution to the waveform for certain gravitational wave events.
• In this paper, we study the prospect of detecting the gravitational wave memory effect directly with the planned space-based gravitational wave detector -- TianQin.
• We find that during its 5 years operation, for the gravitational wave signals that could be detected by TianQin, about $0.5\sim2.0$ signals may contain displacement memory effect with signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) greater than 3.