Higher memory effects and the post-Newtonian calculation of their gravitational-wave signals

Abstract A new hierarchy of lasting gravitational-wave effects (the higher memory effects) was recently identified in asymptotically flat spacetimes, with the better-known displacement, spin, and center-of-mass memory effects included as the lowest two orders in the set of these effects. These gravitational-wave observables are determined by a set of temporal moments of the news tensor, which describes gravitational radiation from an isolated source. The moments of the news can be expressed in terms of changes in charge-like expressions and integrals over retarded time of flux-like terms, some of which vanish in the absence of radiation. In this paper, we compute expressions for the flux-like contributions to the moments of the news in terms of a set of multipoles that characterize the gravitational-wave strain. We also identify a part of the strain that gives rise to these moments of the news. In the context of post-Newtonian theory, we show that the strain related to the moments of the news is responsible for the many nonlinear, instantaneous terms and ‘memory’ terms that appear in the post-Newtonian expressions for the radiative multipole moments of the strain. We also apply our results to compute the leading post-Newtonian expressions for the moments of the news and the corresponding strains that are generated during the inspiral of compact binary sources. These results provide a new viewpoint on the waveforms computed from the multipolar post-Minkowski formalism, and they could be used to assess the detection prospects of this new class of higher memory effects.