PIRSA:17080000

Gravitational Memory, Information, and Black Holes

Hollands, S. (2017). Gravitational Memory, Information, and Black Holes. Perimeter Institute. https://pirsa.org/17080000

Hollands, Stefan. Gravitational Memory, Information, and Black Holes. Perimeter Institute, Aug. 17, 2017, https://pirsa.org/17080000 

          @misc{ pirsa_PIRSA:17080000,
            doi = {10.48660/17080000},
            url = {https://pirsa.org/17080000},
            author = {Hollands, Stefan},
            keywords = {Quantum Gravity},
            language = {en},
            title = {Gravitational Memory, Information, and Black Holes},
            publisher = {Perimeter Institute},
            year = {2017},
            month = {aug},
            note = {PIRSA:17080000 see, \url{https://pirsa.org}}
          }

Stefan Hollands

Universität Leipzig

Talk number
PIRSA:17080000
Collection
Talk Type
Subject
Abstract

A burst of gravitational radiation passing through an arrangement of freely falling test masses far from the source will cause a permanent displacement of the masses, called the ''gravitational memory''. It has recently been found that this memory is closely related to the change in the so called ''super-translation'' charge carried by the spacetime, where ''super-translations'' here refer to an unexpected enlargement of the asymptotic symmetries of general relativity beyond the expected asymptotic Poincare-transformations, known already since the work of Bondi et al. in the early 60s (no relation with ‘’supersymmetry''). I will describe these concepts from an intuitive perspective and point out that super-translations, as well as gravitational memory, are a phenomenon that is unique to relativity in 3+1, but not higher, dimensions. I close the talk by explaining the relation between these results and the notion of a ''charge super-selection sector'' in quantum field theories with massless particles such as QED.

[Based on joint work with A. Ishibashi and R. M. Wald]