Outlook for detecting the gravitational wave displacement and spin memory effects with current and future gravitational wave detectors

Understand

Gravitational wave memory effects arise from non-oscillatory components of gravitational wave signals, and they are predictions of general relativity in the nonlinear regime that have close connections to the asymptotic properties of isolated gravitating systems.

• There are many types of memory effects that have been studied in the literature.
• In this paper we focus on the "displacement" and "spin" memories, which are expected to be the largest of these effects from sources such as the binary black hole mergers which have already been detected by LIGO and Virgo.
• The displacement memory is a change in the relative separation of two initially comoving observers due to a burst of gravitational waves, whereas the spin memory is a portion of the change in relative separation of observers with initial relative velocity.