Speaker
David Nichols
Description
The gravitational-wave displacement and spin memory effects
are predictions of general relativity
that can be caused by nonlinearities in Einstein's
equations. They are characterized by constant
changes in the strain and in the time integral of the
strain's magnetic-parity part, respectively,
before and after the passage of a burst of gravitational
waves. Observing these effects would not
only confirm this feature of general relativity, but it
would give insight into the symmetry group of
asymptotically flat spacetimes. In this talk, I will
introduce these effects, estimate their amplitude
for binary-black hole mergers, and discuss strategies that
ground-based gravitational-wave
detectors can use to observe the displacement and spin
memory effects.
