Outlook for detecting gravitational wave memory effects with current and future gravitational wave detectors

Gravitational wave memory effects appear as non-oscillatory components in a gravitational wave signal, and they are predictions of general relativity in the nonlinear regime that have close connections to the asymptotic properties of isolated gravitating systems. Of these effects, the "displacement" and "spin" memories are expected to be the largest that will be generated from sources such as the binary black hole mergers which have already been detected by LIGO and Virgo. 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. While LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA can only detect memory effects from individual events that are much louder (and thus rarer) than those that have been detected so far, by combining data from multiple events, these effects could be detected in a population of binary mergers. In this talk, we present new forecasts for how long current detectors (LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA) and future detectors (Cosmic Explorer) 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.