Probing general relativistic spin-orbit coupling with strongly lensed gravitational waves

Speaker: Dr. Marius Oancea, Faculty of Physics, University of Vienna, Austria

Spin Hall effects represent a diverse class of physical phenomena related to the propagation of wave packets carrying intrinsic angular momentum. Such wave packets generally experience spin-orbit couplings between their internal and external degrees of freedom, resulting in wave packets following spin-dependent trajectories. These effects have been experimentally observed in optics and condensed matter physics, but they are also expected to occur for wave packets propagating in gravitational fields. In this talk, I will introduce the equations of motion describing the gravitational spin Hall effect and I will discuss some of their properties. Based on this, I will present recent results (arXiv:2209.06459) regarding the strong lensing of gravitational waves generated in hierarchical triple systems. These results suggest that there are plausible astrophysical scenarios in which the gravitational spin Hall effect has a significant imprint for gravitational waves and could lead to experimental observation.