Approximate Universal Relations among Tidal Parameters for Neutron Star Binaries

TL;DR

This paper discovers approximately universal relations between combinations of neutron star tidal deformabilities, which can improve parameter estimation accuracy in gravitational wave observations and help constrain the nuclear equation of state.

Contribution

It identifies nearly equation-of-state independent relations between tidal deformability combinations, enhancing the extraction of neutron star parameters from gravitational wave data.

Findings

Universal relation between symmetric and anti-symmetric tidal deformability combinations

Relations are approximately 20% insensitive to the equation of state

Improves tidal parameter measurement accuracy by up to an order of magnitude

Abstract

One of largest uncertainties in nuclear physics is the relation between the pressure and density of supranuclear matter: the equation of state. Some of this uncertainty may be removed through future gravitational wave observations of neutron star binaries by extracting the tidal deformabilities (or Love numbers) of neutron stars. Previous studies showed that only a certain combination of the individual deformabilities of each body (chirp tidal deformability) can be measured with second-generation gravitational wave interferometers, such as Adv. LIGO, due to correlations between the individual deformabilities. To overcome this, we search for approximately universal (or equation-of-state independent) relations between two combinations of the individual tidal deformabilities, such that once one of them has been measured, the other can be automatically obtained and the individual ones decoupled through these relations. We find an approximately universal relation between the symmetric and the anti-symmetric combination of the individual tidal deformabilities that is equation-of-state-insensitive to $20\%$ for binaries with masses less than $1.7M_\odot$. We show that these relations can be used to eliminate a combination of the tidal parameters from the list of model parameters, thus breaking degeneracies and improving the accuracy in parameter estimation. A simple study shows that the universal relations can improve the accuracy in the extraction of the symmetric combination of tidal parameters by as much as an order of magnitude, making the overall accuracy in the extraction of this parameter slightly better than that of the chirp tidal deformability. These new universal relations and the improved measurement accuracy on tidal parameters not only are important to astrophysics and nuclear physics, but also impact our ability to probe extreme gravity with gravitational waves and cosmology.