Improved Analytic Love-C Relations for Neutron Stars

TL;DR

This paper develops improved analytic models for the Love-C relation in neutron stars, enhancing the accuracy of relating tidal deformability and compactness, which aids in understanding nuclear physics through astrophysical observations.

Contribution

It introduces two new analytic expressions for the Love-C relation, extending Newtonian and relativistic models with spectral expansions, outperforming previous models in accuracy.

Findings

The Newtonian-inspired model provides the most accurate analytic description.

The spectral expansion with Chebyshev polynomials converges faster than previous Taylor methods.

The models improve the practical utility of analytic relations in neutron star physics.

Abstract

Precise measurements of neutron star observables (such as mass and radius) allow one to constrain the equations of state for supranuclear matter and develop a stronger understanding of nuclear physics. The Neutron star Interior Composition ExploreR (NICER) tracks X-ray hotspots on rotating NSs and is able to infer precise information about the compactness of the star. Gravitational waves carry information about the tidal deformability (related to the tidal Love number) of neutron stars, which has been measured by the LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA collaboration. These two observables enjoy an approximately universal property between each other that is insensitive to the equations of state (the "universal Love-C relation"). In this paper, we focus on deriving two analytic expressions for the Love-C relations that are ready-to-use and improve upon previous analytic expressions. The first model is inspired by a Newtonian polytrope, whose perturbation to the gravitational potential can be found analytically. We extend this Newtonian model to the relativistic regime by providing a quadratic fit to the gravitational potential perturbation against stellar compactness. The second model makes use of the Tolman VII model and adopts a spectral expansion with Chebyshev polynomials, which converges faster than the Taylor expansions used in previous work. We find that the first model provides a more accurate description of the Love-C relation for realistic neutron stars than the second model, and it provides the best expression among all other analytic relations studied here in terms of describing the averaged numerical Love-C relation. These new models are not only useful in practice, but they also show the power and importance of analytic modeling of neutron stars.