Gravitational memory meets astrophysical environments: exploring a new frontier through osculations

[2509.01676] Gravitational memory meets astrophysical environments: exploring a new frontier through osculations Skip to main content Search Submit Donate Log in General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology arXiv:2509.01676 (gr-qc) [Submitted on 1 Sep 2025 ( v1 ), last revised 24 Aug 2026 (this version, v4)] Title: Gravitational memory meets astrophysical environments: exploring a new frontier through osculations Authors: Rishabh Kumar Singh , Shailesh Kumar , Abhishek Chowdhuri , Arpan Bhattacharyya View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract: We study how dark matter environments influence nonlinear gravitational memory from intermediate-mass-ratio binaries. Incorporating environmental effects from the dark matter gravitational potential, dynamical friction, and accretion, we compute the leading-order nonlinear memory for both bound and unbound orbits under dark matter minispike profile. For quasi-circular inspirals in a minispike, we additionally include an empirical prescription for the time-dependent evolution of the dark matter profile, which gradually evolves along the inspiral and captures the cumulative environmental response. We find that dark matter can modify the orbital evolution and mode content of the memory relative to the vacuum case, with the cumulative effect depending sensitively on the density profile and on how the environment accelerates the inspiral. We use these waveforms to calculate mismatches in LISA space-based detector, highlighting where memory-driven differences may be large enough to warrant targeted parameter-estimation studies. Our results emphasize that astrophysical environments can leave a hereditary imprint on gravitational memory and provide a framework for connecting memory observables with dark matter dynamics. Comments: V3: Two Column, 22 Pages, 6 Figures, 3 Tables, Substantially revised version with added discussion on the potential detectability of the interplay between nonlinear memory and astrophysical environments, Version accepted to appear in Physical Review D Subjects: General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) ; Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA); High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE); High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) Cite as: arXiv:2509.01676 [gr-qc] (or arXiv:2509.01676v4 [gr-qc] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2509.01676 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite Journal reference: Phys. Rev. D 114, 044096 (2026) Related DOI : https://doi.org/10.1103/7yhw-krjp Focus to learn more DOI(s) linking to related resources Submission history From: Shailesh Kumar [ view email ] [v1] Mon, 1 Sep 2025 18:00:31 UTC (251 KB) [v2] Tue, 10 Mar 2026 20:09:52 UTC (264 KB) [v3] Fri, 7 Aug 2026 17:27:51 UTC (281 KB) [v4] Mon, 24 Aug 2026 11:59:14 UTC (282 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View PDF HTML (experimental) TeX Source view license Current browse context: gr-qc < prev | next > new | recent | 2025-09 Change to browse by: astro-ph astro-ph.GA astro-ph.HE hep-th References & Citations INSPIRE HEP SciX Google Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer ( What is the Explorer? ) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers ( What is Connected Papers? ) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps ( What is Litmaps? ) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations ( What are Smart Citations? ) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv ( What is alphaXiv? ) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers ( What is CatalyzeX? ) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub ( What is DagsHub? ) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub ( What is GotitPub? ) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face ( What is Huggingface? ) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast ( What is ScienceCast? ) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate ( What is Replicate? ) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces ( What is Spaces? ) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI ( What is TXYZ.AI? ) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower ( What are Influence Flowers? ) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender ( What is CORE? ) IArxiv recommender toggle IArxiv Recommender ( What is IArxiv? ) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. 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