Cost of inferred nuclear parameters towards the f-mode dynamical tide in binary neutron stars

TL;DR

This paper assesses how neglecting f-mode dynamical tidal effects in gravitational wave models biases the inferred nuclear parameters of neutron stars, especially the nucleon effective mass, and evaluates the potential constraints from future GW observations.

Contribution

It quantifies the bias in nuclear parameter estimation caused by ignoring dynamical tides and demonstrates the sensitivity of future GW detectors in constraining these parameters.

Findings

Ignoring dynamical tides biases the nucleon effective mass estimate downward by ~6%.

Future GW observations can constrain the effective mass to within 3-5%.

Other nuclear parameters are less affected by the dynamical tide neglect.

Abstract

Gravitational Wave (GW) observations from Neutron Stars (NS) in a binary system provide an excellent scenario to constrain the nuclear parameters. The investigation of Pratten et al. (2022) has shown that the ignorance of f-mode dynamical tidal correction in the GW waveform model of the binary neutron star (BNS) system can lead to substantial bias in the measurement of NS properties and NS equations of state (EOS). In this work, we investigate the bias in the nuclear parameters resulting from the ignorance of dynamical tidal correction. In addition, this work demonstrates the sensitivity of the nuclear parameters and the estimated constraints on them from future GW observations. We infer the nuclear parameters from GW observations by describing the NS matter within the relativistic mean field model. For a population of GW events, we notice that the ignorance of dynamical tide predicts a lower median for nucleon effective mass ($m^*$) by $\sim6\%$ compared to the scenario when dynamical tidal correction is considered. Whereas at a 90\% credible interval(CI), $m^*$ gets constrained up to $\sim 5\%$ and $\sim 3\%$ in A+ (the LIGO-Virgo detectors with a sensitivity of 5th observing run) and Cosmic Explorer (CE) respectively. We also discuss the resulting constraints on all other nuclear parameters, including compressibility, symmetry energy, and slope of symmetry energy, considering an ensemble of GW events. We do not notice any significant impact in analyzing nuclear parameters other than $m^*$ due to the ignorance of f-mode dynamical tides.