Reconstructing the neutron-star equation of state with gravitational-wave detectors from a realistic population of inspiralling binary neutron stars

By B. Lackey, Leslie Wade. 2014

144 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Gravitational-wave observations of inspiralling binary neutron star systems can be used to measure the neutron-star equation of state (EOS) through the tidally induced shift in the waveform phase that depends on the tidal deformability parameter $\lambda$. Previous work has shown that $\lambda$, a function of the neutron-star EOS and mass, is measurable by Advanced LIGO for a single event when including tidal information up to the merger frequency. In this work, we describe a method for stacking measurements of $\lambda$ from multiple inspiral events to measure the EOS. We use Markov chain Monte Carlo simulations to estimate the parameters of a 4-parameter piecewise polytrope EOS that matches theoretical EOS models to a few percent. We find that, for "realistic" event rates ($\sim 40$ binary neutron star inspiral events per year with signal-to-noise ratio $> 8$ in a single Advanced LIGO detector), combining a year of gravitational-wave data from a three-detector network with the constraints from causality and recent high mass neutron-star measurements, the EOS above nuclear density can be measured to better than a factor of two in pressure in most cases. We also find that in the mass range $1M_\odot$--$2M_\odot$, the neutron-star radius can be measured to better than $\pm 1$ km and the tidal deformability can be measured to better than $\pm 1 \times 10^{36}$ g cm$^2$ s$^2$ (10%--50% depending on the EOS and mass). The overwhelming majority of this information comes from the loudest $\sim 5$ events. Current uncertainties in the post-Newtonian waveform model, however, lead to systematic errors in the EOS measurement that are as large as the statistical errors, and more accurate waveform models are needed to minimize this error.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Ocean Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f3d959ce8bf1b96ec8898daeabf7dafa23938250

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Citations in the corpus

Properties of the Binary Neutron Star Merger GW170817 (2018, unknown): “relations [101–103] or a parametrized EOS [142,143].”
Evidence for a maximum mass cut-off in the neutron star mass distribution and constraints on the equation of state (2017, background): “Gravitational wave observations of coalescing NS-NS or NS-black hole binaries with Advanced LIGO and VIRGO are expected to put constraints on the EoS primarily via determination of the NS tidal deformability (Del Pozzo et al. 2013; Agathos et al. 2015; Lackey & Wade 2015).”
Constraining the Maximum Mass of Neutron Stars from Multi-messenger Observations of GW170817 (2017, background): “H E ] 8 N ov 2 01 7 2 et al. 2012; Favata 2014; Read et al. 2013; Del Pozzo et al. 2013; Agathos et al. 2015; Lackey & Wade 2015; Chatziioannou et al. 2015) and for quasi-periodic oscillations of the post-merger remnant (e.g. Bauswein & Janka 2012; Bauswein et al. 2012; Clark et al. 2014; Bauswein…”
GW170817: Joint Constraint on the Neutron Star Equation of State from Multimessenger Observations (2017, background): “…(Flanagan & Hinderer 2008; Damour & Nagar 2010; Hinderer et al. 2010, 2016; Damour et al. 2012; Del Pozzo et al. 2013; Read et al. 2013; Favata 2014; Wade et al. 2014; Bernuzzi et al. 2015b; Lackey & Wade 2015; Hotokezaka et al. 2016; Lackey et al. 2017; Dietrich et al. 2017a; Kiuchi et al. 2017).”
Detecting Binary Compact-object Mergers with Gravitational Waves: Understanding and Improving the Sensitivity of the PyCBC Search (2017, background): “For binary neutron stars, the fit of the model is already very high for detection searches (Brown et al. 2012), although improvements will help parameter measurement (Lackey & Wade 2015).”
Tidal Deformability from GW170817 as a Direct Probe of the Neutron Star Radius (2018, background): “The degree of the deviation depends on the underlying EOS and, as a result, could be used to differentiate between EOS that differ in radius by only ∼1 km (Read et al. 2009b, 2013; Lackey & Wade 2015).”
Unequal mass binary neutron star mergers and multimessenger signals (2016, background): “The delicate nature of distinguishing EoS effects in binary neutron star systems has been thoroughly discussed in [68, 69], which stressed the need for tens of events to disentangling EoS differences if employing gravitational waves alone.”
Neutron Star Extreme Matter Observatory: A kilohertz-band gravitational-wave detector in the global network (2020, methodology): “In general, neutron star–black hole binaries are a less sensitive probe of the equation of state than binary neutron star mergers (e.g., see Kumar, Pürrer, & Pfeiffer 2017, cf. Lackey & Wade 2015; Hernandez Vivanco et al. 2019 for binary neutron stars).”