The “gravitational memory effect” due to an exact plane wave provides us with an elementary description of the diffeomorphisms associated with the analogue of “soft gravitons for this nonasymptotically flat system. We explain how the presence of the latter may be detected by observing the motion of freely falling particles or other forms of gravitational wave detection. Numerical calculations confirm the relevance of the first, second and third time integrals of the Riemann tensor pointed out earlier. Solutions for various profiles are constructed. It is also shown how to extend our treatment to Einstein-Maxwell plane waves and a midisuperspace quantization is given.

The well-known 5-parameter isometry group of plane gravitational waves in 4 dimensions is identified as Lévy-Leblond’s Carroll group in 2 + 1 dimensions with no rotations. Our clue is that plane waves are Bargmann spaces into which Carroll manifolds can be embedded. We also comment on the scattering of light by a gravitational wave and calculate its electric permittivity considered as an impedance-matched metamaterial.

Impulsive gravitational plane waves, which have a δ -function singularity on a hypersurface, can be obtained by squeezing smooth plane gravitational waves with a Gaussian profile. They exhibit (as do their smooth counterparts) the velocity memory effect: after the wave has passed, particles initially at rest move apart with non-vanishing constant transverse velocity. A new effect is that, unlike the smooth case, (i) the velocities of particles originally at rest jump, (ii) the spacetime trajectories become discontinuous along the (lightlike) propagation direction of the wave.