Binary neutron star mergers of quark matter based nuclear equations of state

Abstract

With observations of gravitational wave signals from binary neutron star mergers (BNSM) by LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration and NICER, the nuclear equation of state (EOS) is becoming increasingly testable by complementary numerical simulations. Numerous simulations currently explore the EOS at different density regimes for the constituent neutron stars specifically narrowing the uncertainty in the sub-nuclear densities. In this paper we summarize the three-dimensional general relativistic-hydrodynamics based simulations of BNSMs for EOSs with a specific emphasis on the quark matter EOS at the highest densities.

Snowmass2021 Cosmic Frontier White Paper: Numerical relativity for next-generation gravitational-wave probes of fundamental physics

“…The size of a neutron star also determines if and when it can be tidally disrupted by a black hole companion (for black hole-neutron star binaries) and when two neutron stars collide and merge (for neutron star-neutron star binaries) [112][113][114][115]. Finally, the post-merger evolution of a neutron star-neutron star binary is strongly impacted by the properties of dense matter: unknown nuclear physics determines whether the remnant collapses to a black hole, as well as the frequency of post-merger gravitational waves driven by oscillations in the remnant [116][117][118][119][120][121][122][123][124][125][126][127][128][129][130][131][132]. Recovering this information from gravitational-wave observations requires an accurate theoretical understanding of the emitted waves and thus high-accuracy numerical relativity simulations.…”