Accuracy in Measuring the Neutron Star Mass in Gravitational Wave Parameter Estimation for Black Hole-Neutron Star Binaries

TL;DR

This study evaluates the accuracy of neutron star mass measurements in black hole-neutron star binary systems using gravitational wave data, highlighting how spin and mass influence measurement errors.

Contribution

It introduces a Fisher matrix-based analysis of neutron star mass measurement errors in GW signals, considering spin effects and different mass ranges.

Findings

Fractional errors range from 10% to 50% for NS mass measurements.

Errors increase with higher black hole spins, especially for larger NS masses.

Mass errors can surpass true NS mass for high spins and massive neutron stars.

Abstract

Recently, two gravitational wave (GW) signals, named as GW150914 and GW151226, have been detected by the two LIGO detectors. Although both signals were identified as originating from merging black hole (BH) binaries, GWs from systems containing neutron stars (NSs) are also expected to be detected in the near future by the Advanced detector network. In this work, we assess the accuracy in measuring the NS mass ($M_{ns}$) for the GWs from BH-NS binaries adopting the Advanced LIGO sensitivity with a signal-to-noise ratio of 10. By using the Fisher matrix method, we calculate the measurement errors ($\sigma$) in $M_{ns}$ assuming the NS mass of $1 \leq M_{ns}/M_{\odot} \leq 2$ and low mass BHs with the range of $4 \leq M_{bh}/M_{\odot} \leq 10$. We used the TaylorF2 waveform model where the spins are aligned with the orbital angular momentum, but here we only consider the BH spins. We find that the fractional errors ($\sigma/M_{ns} \times 100$) are in the range of $10\% - 50\%$ in our mass region for a given dimensionless BH spin as $\chi_{bh} = 0$. The errors tend to increase as the BH spin increases, and this tendency is stronger for higher NS masses (or higher total masses). In particular, for the highest mass NSs ($M_{ns}=2~M_{\odot}$), the errors $\sigma$ can be larger than the true value of $M_{ns}$ if the dimensionless BH spin exceeds $\sim 0.6$.