Forecasting the detection of gravitational wave memory by current and future gravitational wave detectors

Gravitational wave memory effects are non-oscillatory components of gravitational wave signals that provide interesting tests of general relativity in the nonlinear regime. There are many types of memory effects that have been studied in the literature; in this talk we focus on the "displacement" and "spin" memories, which are expected to be the largest effects from binary black hole mergers. The displacement memory is a change in the relative separation of two initially comoving observers due to a burst of gravitational waves, whereas the spin memory is a portion of the change in relative separation of observers with initial relative velocity. As both of these effects are small, detection by LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA is unlikely for single events. However, by combining data from multiple events, these effects could potentially be detected in a population of binary mergers. In this talk, we present estimates for how long current and future detectors will need to operate in order to measure these effects from populations of binary black hole systems that are consistent with the populations inferred from the detections from LIGO and Virgo's first three observing runs.