Probing hybrid stars with gravitational waves via interfacial modes

TL;DR

This paper explores how gravitational waves from binary neutron star inspirals can reveal the presence of a quark-hadron phase transition inside hybrid stars through the detection of interfacial modes, offering a new way to probe dense matter physics.

Contribution

It introduces the study of interfacial $i$-modes in hybrid stars and assesses their detectability with current and future gravitational-wave detectors.

Findings

Resonant $i$-mode frequencies range from 300Hz to 1500Hz.

Detection of $i$-modes is possible with GW170817 and GW190425 under certain conditions.

Third-generation detectors can probe $i$-modes at intermediate transition pressures.

Abstract

One of the uncertainties in nuclear physics is whether a phase transition between hadronic nuclear matter to quark matter exists in supranuclear matter equations of state. Such a feature can be probed via gravitational-wave signals from binary neutron star inspirals that contain information of the induced tides. The dynamical part of the tides is caused by the resonance of pulsation modes of stars, which causes a shift in the gravitational-wave phase. In this paper, we investigate the dynamical tides of the interfacial mode ($i$-mode) of spherical degree $l=2$, a non-radial mode caused by an interface associated with a quark-hadron phase transition inside a hybrid star. In particular, we focus on hybrid stars with a crystalline quark matter core and a fluid hadronic envelope. We find that the resonant frequency of such $i$-modes typically ranges from 300Hz to 1500Hz, and the frequency increases as the shear modulus of the quark core increases. We next estimate the detectability of such a mode with existing and future gravitational-wave events from the inspiral waveform with a Fisher analysis. We find that GW170817 and GW190425 have the potential to detect the $i$-mode if the quark-hadron phase transition occurs at sufficiently low pressure and the shear modulus of the quark matter phase is large enough. We also find that the third-generation gravitational-wave detectors can further probe the $i$-mode with intermediate transition pressure. This finding opens a new, interesting direction for probing the existence of quark core inside a neutron star.