Gravitational-Wave Research Seminar

  Gravitational-wave observations of compact binaries containing neutron  stars can be used to measure the neutron-star equation of state (EOS). The  most reliable information is likely to come from measurements of the tidal  deformability parameter lambda in binary neutron star systems, and previous  work has shown that lambda can be measured with large errors by Advanced  LIGO. In this talk, I will describe a method for stacking measurements of  lambda from multiple inspiral events to reconstruct the EOS. We use Markov  chain Monte Carlo simulations to estimate the parameters of a parameterized  EOS that matches theoretical EOS models to a few percent. We find that, for  realistic event rates, combining a year of gravitational-wave data with the  constraints from causality and recent high mass neutron-star measurements,  the EOS above nuclear density can be measured to better than a factor of  two in most cases. We also find that the neutron-star radius can be  measured to ±1km. Current uncertainties in the post-Newtonian waveform  model, however, lead to systematic errors in the EOS measurement that are  as large as the statistical errors, and more accurate waveform models are  needed to minimize this error.