More on cosmological gravitational waves and their memories

Abstract

We extend recent theoretical results on the propagation of linear gravitational waves (GWs), including their associated memories, in spatially flat Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker universes, for all spacetime dimensions higher than 3. By specializing to a cosmology driven by a perfect fluid with a constant equation-of-state w, conformal re-scaling, dimension-reduction and Nariai’s ansatz may then be exploited to obtain analytic expressions for the graviton and photon Green’s functions, allowing their causal structure to be elucidated. When , the gauge-invariant scalar mode admits wave solutions, and like its tensor counterpart, likely contributes to the tidal squeezing and stretching of the space around a GW detector. In addition, scalar GWs in 4D radiation dominated universes—like tensor GWs in 4D matter dominated ones—appear to yield a tail signal that does not decay with increasing spatial distance from the source. We then solve electromagnetism in the same cosmologies, and point out a tail-induced electric memory effect. Finally, in even dimensional Minkowski backgrounds higher than 2, we make a brief but explicit comparison between the linear GW memory generated by point masses scattering off each other on unbound trajectories and the linear Yang–Mills memory generated by color point charges doing the same—and point out how there is a ‘double copy’ relation between the two.