Binary neutron star mergers as a probe of quark-hadron crossover equations of state

Atul Kedia, Hee Il Kim, In Saeng Suh, Grant J. Mathews

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18 Scopus citations

Abstract

It is anticipated that the gravitational radiation detected in future gravitational wave (GW) detectors from binary neutron star (NS) mergers can probe the high-density equation of state (EOS). We perform the first simulations of binary NS mergers which adopt various parametrizations of the quark-hadron crossover (QHC) EOS. These are constructed from combinations of a hadronic EOS (nb<2 n0) and a quark-matter EOS (nb>5 n0), where nb and n0 are the baryon number density and the nuclear saturation density, respectively. At the crossover densities (2 n0<nb<5 n0) the QHC EOSs continuously soften, while remaining stiffer than hadronic and first-order phase transition EOSs, achieving the stiffness of strongly correlated quark matter. This enhanced stiffness leads to significantly longer lifetimes of the postmerger NS than that for a pure hadronic EOS. We find a dual nature of these EOSs such that their maximum chirp GW frequencies fmax fall into the category of a soft EOS while the dominant peak frequencies (fpeak) of the postmerger stage fall in between that of a soft and stiff hadronic EOS. An observation of this kind of dual nature in the characteristic GW frequencies will provide crucial evidence for the existence of strongly interacting quark matter at the crossover densities for QCD.

Original languageEnglish
Article number103027
JournalPhysical Review D
Volume106
Issue number10
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 15 2022

Funding

Work at the Center for Astrophysics of the University of Notre Dame is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under Nuclear Theory Grant No. DE-FG02-95-ER40934. A. K. acknowledges support from National Science Foundation Grant No. AST-1909534. This research was supported in part by the Notre Dame Center for Research Computing through high performance computing resources. H. I. K. graciously thanks Jinho Kim and Chunglee Kim for continuous support. The work of H. I. K. was supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education through the Center for Quantum Spacetime (CQUeST) of Sogang University (Grant No. NRF-2020R1A6A1A03047877). This research used resources of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725. Software used was as follows: einstein toolkit (Ref. ), lorene (Refs. ), p y c actus , and tov solver .

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