Imprints of the nuclear symmetry energy on the tidal deformability of neutron stars

Plamen G. Krastev; Bao-An Li

doi:10.1088/1361-6471/ab1a7a

paper

Imprints of the nuclear symmetry energy on the tidal deformability of neutron stars

arXiv:1801.04620 · doi:10.1088/1361-6471/ab1a7a

Abstract

Applying an equation of state (EOS) with its symmetric nuclear matter (SNM) contribution and low-density symmetry energy $E_{sy m} (ρ)$ constrained by heavy-ion reaction data, we calculate the dimensionless tidal deformability $Λ$ of neutron stars in coalescing binary systems. Corresponding to the partially constrained EOS that previously predicted a radius of 11.5 km $\leq R_{1.4} \leq$ 13.6 km for canonical neutron-star configurations, $Λ$ is found to be in the range of 292 $\leq Λ_{1.4} \leq$ 680, consistent with the very recent observation of the GW170817 event. We investigate the effect of the high-density behavior of $E_{sy m} (ρ)$ on the tidal properties of neutron stars and find that while $Λ$ depends strongly on the details of the symmetry energy, different trends of $E_{sy m} (ρ)$ lead to very similar values of $Λ$ . In particular, the transition from stiff/soft to soft/stiff $E_{sy m} (ρ)$ could yield the same $Λ$ . Thus, measuring $Λ$ alone may not determine completely the density dependence of the symmetry energy. Coherent analyses of the dense neutron-rich nuclear matter EOS underlying both nuclear laboratory experiments and astrophysical observations are therefore necessary to break this degeneracy and determine precisely the details of the $E_{sy m} (ρ)$ .

20 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables. Added new results and discussions, JPG (2019) in press

Imprints of the nuclear symmetry energy on the tidal deformability of neutron stars

Abstract

References in corpus (28)

Cited by in corpus (37)