From shockwaves to the gravitational memory effect
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1.
California Institute of Technology
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2.
University of Amsterdam
Abstract
We study the relationship between shockwave geometries and the gravitational memory effect in four-dimensional asymptotically flat spacetime. In particular, we show the 't Hooft commutation relations of shockwave operators are equivalent to the commutation relation between soft and Goldstone modes parametrizing a sector of the gravitational phase space. We demonstrate this equivalence via a diffeomorphism that takes a shockwave metric to a metric whose transverse traceless component is the gravitational memory. The shockwave momentum in 't Hooft's analysis is related to the soft graviton mode, which is responsible for the memory effect, while the shift in the shockwave position is related to the Goldstone mode. This equivalence opens new directions to utilize the gravitational memory effect to explore the observational implications of shockwave geometries in flat space.
Copyright and License
© The Authors. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits any use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
Article funded by SCOAP3.
Acknowledgement
We thank Tim Adamo, Luis Apolo, Vincent Chen, Andrea Cristofoli, Laurent Freidel, Ben Freivogel, Vincent S. H. Lee, Prahar Mitra, Monica Pate, and Erik Verlinde for discussions, as well as Massimo Porrati and Andrew Strominger for useful feedback. We are supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation “Observational Signatures of Quantum Gravity” collaboration grant 2021-2817. The work of KZ is also supported by a Simons Investigator award and the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics, under Award No. DE-SC0011632.
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Additional details
- Heising-Simons Foundation
- 2021-2817
- Simons Foundation
- United States Department of Energy
- DE-SC0011632
- SCOAP3
- Accepted
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2023-12-17
- Available
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2024-01-03Published
- Caltech groups
- Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy (PMA)
- Publication Status
- Published