The curious case of parabolic encounters: gravitational waves with linear & non-linear memory

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Hauptverfasser: Dutta, Samik, Chhabra, Ankur, Banerjee, Aritra, Mukherjee, Sajal, Mohanty, Subhendra
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Dutta, Samik
Chhabra, Ankur
Banerjee, Aritra
Mukherjee, Sajal
Mohanty, Subhendra
author_facet Dutta, Samik
Chhabra, Ankur
Banerjee, Aritra
Mukherjee, Sajal
Mohanty, Subhendra
contents The memory effect is known to introduce a permanent displacement in the gravitational wave (GW) detectors after the passage of a GW signal. While the linear memory adheres to the source properties, the non-linear memory is a secondary effect sourced by the GW itself. In the present work, we discuss GW signals with both these kinds of memory effects, while focusing on the parabolic limit of an encounter. This special case is theoretically intriguing and emerges as a limiting situation for both eccentric and hyperbolic events. However, in this paper, we argue that a simple extrapolation of memory calculations for eccentric or hyperbolic cases to the parabolic case may lead to incorrect estimations. Therefore, we treat the parabola as a special case and use an intrinsic parameterization, with which we calculate gravitational wave signals and their energy spectrum via an effective field theory formalism. Unlike the hyperbolic case, which is known to have linear memory, we notice that parabolic encounters bring out new features in the zero frequency limit (ZFL). Our work highlights some of the key challenges and salient aspects of these encounters, and paves the way to study such binary evolution with nonzero memory.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_01968
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The curious case of parabolic encounters: gravitational waves with linear & non-linear memory
Dutta, Samik
Chhabra, Ankur
Banerjee, Aritra
Mukherjee, Sajal
Mohanty, Subhendra
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
High Energy Physics - Theory
The memory effect is known to introduce a permanent displacement in the gravitational wave (GW) detectors after the passage of a GW signal. While the linear memory adheres to the source properties, the non-linear memory is a secondary effect sourced by the GW itself. In the present work, we discuss GW signals with both these kinds of memory effects, while focusing on the parabolic limit of an encounter. This special case is theoretically intriguing and emerges as a limiting situation for both eccentric and hyperbolic events. However, in this paper, we argue that a simple extrapolation of memory calculations for eccentric or hyperbolic cases to the parabolic case may lead to incorrect estimations. Therefore, we treat the parabola as a special case and use an intrinsic parameterization, with which we calculate gravitational wave signals and their energy spectrum via an effective field theory formalism. Unlike the hyperbolic case, which is known to have linear memory, we notice that parabolic encounters bring out new features in the zero frequency limit (ZFL). Our work highlights some of the key challenges and salient aspects of these encounters, and paves the way to study such binary evolution with nonzero memory.
title The curious case of parabolic encounters: gravitational waves with linear & non-linear memory
topic General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
High Energy Physics - Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01968