Rapid Hierarchical Inference of Neutron Star Equation of State from multiple Gravitational Wave Observations of Binary Neutron Star Coalescences

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fast, efficient hierarchical inference algorithm for neutron star equations of state using gravitational wave data, enabling rapid updates with new observations and theoretical insights.

Contribution

The authors develop a novel computational method that re-uses single-event parameter estimation samples to significantly reduce the cost of EoS inference from multiple gravitational wave events.

Findings

Method produces EoS constraints consistent with existing analyses.

Algorithm is computationally cheap and allows rapid re-analysis.

Effective on both real and simulated gravitational wave data.

Abstract

Bayesian hierarchical inference of phenomenological parameterized neutron star equations of state (EoS) from multiple gravitational wave observations of binary neutron star mergers is of fundamental importance in improving our understanding of neutron star structure, the general properties of matter at supra nuclear densities and the strong nuclear force. However, such an analysis is computationally costly as it is unable to re-use single-event EoS agnostic parameter estimation runs that are carried out regardless for generating gravitational wave transient catalogs. With the number of events expected to be observable during the 4th observing run (O4) of LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA, this problem can only be expected to worsen. We develop a novel and robust algorithm for rapid and computationally cheap hierarchical inference of parameterized EoSs from gravitational wave data which re-uses single event EoS agnostic parameter estimation samples to significantly reduce computational cost. We efficiently include a priori knowledge of neutron star physics as Bayesian priors on the EoS parameters. The high speed and low computational cost of our method allow for efficient re-computation of EoS inference every time a new binary neutron star event is discovered or whenever new observations and theoretical discoveries change the prior on EoS parameters. We test our method on both real and simulated gravitational wave data to demonstrate its accuracy. We show that our computationally cheap method produces EoS constraints that are completely consistent with existing analysis for real data, the chosen fiducial EoS for simulated data. Armed with our fast analysis scheme, we also study the variability of EoS constraints with binary neutron star properties for sets of simulated events drawn in different signal-to-noise ratio and mass ranges.