Black hole-neutron star mergers with massive neutron stars in numerical relativity

TL;DR

This study uses numerical relativity to analyze black hole-neutron star mergers, revealing that remnant disk and ejecta masses depend mainly on the neutron star's compactness, mass ratio, and black hole spin, with minimal influence from neutron star mass.

Contribution

It demonstrates that merger outcomes are primarily governed by compactness, mass ratio, and black hole spin, validating simplified models across different neutron star masses.

Findings

Remnant disk and ejecta masses are consistent across models with same compactness, mass ratio, and spin.

Fitting formulas for merger outcomes are accurate for more compact neutron stars within numerical errors.

Results support fixing neutron star mass when studying tidal disruption dependence on EOS.

Abstract

We study the merger of black hole-neutron star (BH-NS) binaries in numerical relativity, focusing on the properties of the remnant disk and the ejecta, varying the mass of compactness of the NS and the mass and spin of the BH. We find that within the precision of our numerical simulations, the remnant disk mass and ejecta mass normalized by the NS baryon mass ($\hat{M}_{\rm{rem}}$ and $\hat{M}_{\rm{eje}}$, respectively), and the cutoff frequency $f_{\rm{cut}}$ normalized by the initial total gravitational mass of the system at infinite separation approximately agree among the models with the same NS compactness $C_{\rm{NS}}=M_{\rm{NS}}/R_{\rm{NS}}$, mass ratio $Q=M_{\rm{BH}}/M_{\rm{NS}}$, and dimensionless BH spin $\chi_{\rm{BH}}$ irrespective of the NS mass $M_{\rm{NS}}$ in the range of $1.092$--$1.691\,M_\odot$. This result shows that the merger outcome depends sensitively on $Q$, $\chi_{\rm BH}$, and $C_{\rm{NS}}$ but only weekly on $M_{\rm{NS}}$. This justifies the approach of studying the dependence of NS tidal disruptions on the NS compactness by fixing the NS mass but changing the EOS. We further perform simulations with massive NSs of $M_{\rm{NS}}=1.8M_{\odot}$, and compare our results of $\hat{M}_{\rm{rem}}$ and $\hat{M}_{\rm{eje}}$ with those given by existing fitting formulas to test their robustness for more compact NSs. We find that the fitting formulas obtained in the previous studies are accurate within the numerical errors assumed, while our results also suggest that further improvement is possible by systematically performing more precise numerical simulations.