Gyroscopic gravitational memory from quasi-circular binary systems

Abstract

Gravitational waves cause freely falling spinning objects to precess, resulting in a net orientation change called gyroscopic memory. In this paper, we will consider isolated gravitational sources in the post-Newtonian (PN) framework and compute the gyroscopic precession and memory at leading PN orders. We compare two competing contributions: the spin memory and the nonlinear helicity flux. At the level of the precession rate, the former is a 2PN oscillatory effect, while the latter is a 4PN adiabatic effect. However, the gyroscopic memory involves a time integration, which enhances subleading adiabatic effects by the fifth power of the velocity of light, leading to a 1.5PN memory effect. We explicitly compute the leading effects for a quasi-circular binary system and obtain the angular dependence of the memory on the celestial sphere.