Hereditary Effects and New Optical Properties of Nonlinear Gravitational Waves

Abstract

We investigate new optical effects of nonlinear gravitational waves that arise from hereditary effects. Firstly, we show that the amplitude of continuous plane waves has a hereditary effect that grows with distance. This can make the amplitude of nonlinear gravitational waves decay more slowly with distance. This will also lead to observable nonlinear effects in future observations. Secondly, hereditary effects also imply that nonlinear perturbations are nonlocally dependent on linear ones, and this property leads to some special optical effects which allow nonlinear gravitational waves to contain more information. It is even possible to extract information on the distance and direction of the wave source as well as the polarization from the waveform of nonlinear gravitational waves.