Abstract
We study the motion of a gyroscope located far away from an isolated gravitational source in an asymptotically flat spacetime. As seen from a local frame tied to distant stars, the gyroscope precesses when gravitational waves cross its path, resulting in a net ‘orientation memory’ that carries information on the wave profile. At leading order in the inverse distance to the source, the memory consists of two terms: the first is linear in the metric perturbation and coincides with the spin memory effect, while the second is quadratic and measures the net helicity of the wave burst. Both are closely related to symmetries of the gravitational radiative phase space at null infinity: spin memory probes superrotation charges, while helicity is the canonical generator of local electric-magnetic duality on the celestial sphere.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Glenn Barnich, Jorrit Bosma, Marc Geiller, Mahdi Godazgar, Gregory Kozyreff and Marios Petropoulos for illuminating interactions on (dual) asymptotic symmetries, precession, and memory effects. In addition, we thank Miguel Paulos for suggesting to use pulsars as gyroscopes, as well as Kaye Jiale Li and Joana Teixeira for illuminating interactions on pulsars. A.S. also wishes to thank Gilles Esposito-Farèse, Roberto Oliveri and Simone Speziale for crucial discussions on gyroscopes and memory. Finally, we thank the anonymous referee for a manifestly careful reading of our manuscript and questions that contributed to an improved updated paper.
The work of A.S. is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 801505. The work of B.O. is supported by the ANR grant TopO No. ANR-17-CE30-0013-01, and by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 846244.
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Seraj, A., Oblak, B. Gyroscopic gravitational memory. J. High Energ. Phys. 2023, 57 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP11(2023)057
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP11(2023)057