Michele's wiki/blog

Authors: Eanna E. Flanagan, Tanja Hinderer

Date: 12 Sep 2007

Abstract: We quantify the ability of ground-based gravitational wave detectors to constrain the nuclear equation of state using the early, low frequency portion of the signal of detected neutron star - neutron star (NS-NS) inspirals. In this early adiabatic regime, the influence of a NS's internal structure on the phase of the waveform depends only on a single parameter lambda of the star related to its tidal Love number, namely the ratio of the induced quadrupole moment to the perturbing tidal gravitational field. We restrict attention to gravitational wave frequencies smaller than a cutoff frequency of 400 Hz. In this domain, f-mode frequency dependent corrections to the internal-structure signal are less than 3%, and higher order multipole corrections are less than 5%, for NS models with f-mode frequencies greater than 1 kHz. For an inspiral of two non-spinning 1.4 solar mass NSs at a signal-to-noise ratio of 20, LIGO I (LIGO II) detectors will be able to constrain lambda to lambda < 1.3 (3.3) 10ˆ(37) g cmˆ2 sˆ2 with 90% confidence. Fully relativistic NS models show that the corresponding constraint on radius for LIGO I would be R < 12.5 km (14.1 km) for a n=0.5 (n=1.0) polytrope, for 1.4 solar mass NSs.

abs pdf