Neutron Stars as Perfect Fluids: Extracting the Linearized Response Function

TL;DR

This paper derives the relativistic linear tidal response of neutron stars modeled as perfect fluids, providing a mode-sum response function and dynamical tidal deformabilities from fundamental fluid and metric perturbation analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a covariant effective action approach to derive neutron star tidal responses, connecting fluid dynamics with metric perturbations and mode spectra.

Findings

Hermitian operator with discrete spectrum of modes

Analytic expressions for dynamical tidal deformabilities

Mode-sum response function derived from fundamental principles

Abstract

We derive the general relativistic linear tidal response of a neutron star modeled as a barotropic perfect fluid. From the covariant fluid effective action, we linearize about equilibrium and obtain the action for fluid displacements coupled to metric perturbations. Splitting the latter into external and induced parts and integrating out the induced field yields a Hermitian operator and a discrete gapped spectrum of driven modes. Projecting the displacement onto this eigenbasis and integrating out the spatial dependence over the stellar radius reduces the dynamics to tidal-driven oscillators, with couplings set by relativistic inner products and overlap integrals. Matching to the quadrupolar worldline effective action gives a mode-sum response function and analytic dynamical tidal deformabilities from mode frequencies, normalizations, and overlaps.