Spin effects on neutron star fundamental-mode dynamical tides: phenomenology and comparison to numerical simulations

TL;DR

This paper develops a simplified model to incorporate spin effects on neutron star tidal modes in gravitational wave signals, improving agreement with numerical simulations and aiding future data analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approximate description of spin-induced Coriolis effects on neutron star tidal modes within waveform models, enhancing their accuracy.

Findings

Inclusion of spin effects improves waveform model accuracy.

The model aligns better with numerical relativity simulations.

Relativistic corrections like redshift and frame-dragging are identified as important for future work.

Abstract

Gravitational waves from neutron star binary inspirals contain information on strongly-interacting matter in unexplored, extreme regimes. Extracting this requires robust theoretical models of the signatures of matter in the gravitational-wave signals due to spin and tidal effects. In fact, spins can have a significant impact on the tidal excitation of the quasi-normal modes of a neutron star, which is not included in current state-of-the-art waveform models. We develop a simple approximate description that accounts for the Coriolis effect of spin on the tidal excitation of the neutron star's quadrupolar and octupolar fundamental quasi-normal modes and incorporate it in the SEOBNRv4T waveform model. We show that the Coriolis effect introduces only one new interaction term in an effective action in the co-rotating frame of the star, and fix the coefficient by considering the spin-induced shift in the resonance frequencies that has been computed numerically for the mode frequencies of rotating neutron stars in the literature. We investigate the impact of relativistic corrections due to the gravitational redshift and frame-dragging effects, and identify important directions where more detailed theoretical developments are needed in the future. Comparisons of our new model to numerical relativity simulations of double neutron star and neutron star-black hole binaries show improved consistency in the agreement compared to current models used in data analysis