Dynamical tides in neutron stars with first-order phase transitions: the role of the discontinuity mode

Abstract

During the late stages of a binary neutron star inspiral, dynamical tides induced in each star by its companion become significant and should be included in complete gravitational-wave (GW) modeling. We investigate the coupling between the tidal field and quasi-normal modes in hybrid stars and show that the discontinuity mode ($g$-mode) - intrinsically associated with first-order phase transitions and buoyancy - contributes non-negligibly compared with the fundamental $f$-mode. We find that the $g$-mode overlap integral can reach up to $\sim 10\%$ of the $f$-mode value for hybrid star masses in the range 1.4-2.0$M_{\odot }$, with the largest values generally associated with larger density jumps. This leads to a GW phase shift due to the $g$-mode of $\Delta {\varphi }_g\lesssim 0.1$-$1$ rad (i.e., up to $\sim 5\%-10\%$ of $\Delta {\varphi }_f$), with the largest shifts occurring for masses near the phase transition. At higher masses, the shifts remain smaller and nearly constant, with $\Delta {\varphi }_g\lesssim 0.1$ rad (roughly $\sim 1\%$ of $\Delta {\varphi }_f$). These GW shifts may be relevant even at the design sensitivity of current second-generation GW detectors in the most optimistic cases. Moreover, if a $g$-mode is present and lies near the $f$-mode frequency, neglecting it in the GW modeling can lead to systematic biases in neutron star parameter estimation, resulting in radius errors of up to $1\%-2\%$. These results show the importance of dynamical tides to probe neutron stars' equation of state, and to test the existence of dense-matter phase transitions.

15 pages: 9 pages of main text (including references) and 6 pages of Supplemental Material. Updated discussions on nonlinearities near the phase-transition mass, GW170817, and perturbation amplitudes; new Fig. 3. Accepted in Physical Review Letters