Abstract

The long-awaited detection of a gravitational wave from the merger of a binary neutron star in August 2017 (GW170817) marks the beginning of the new field of multi-messenger gravitational wave astronomy. By exploiting the extracted tidal deformations of the two neutron stars from the late inspiral phase of GW170817, it is now possible to constrain several global properties of the equation of state of neutron star matter. However, the most interesting part of the high density and temperature regime of the equation of state is solely imprinted in the post-merger gravitational wave emission from the remnant hypermassive/supramassive neutron star. This regime was not observed in GW170817, but will possibly be detected in forthcoming events within the current observing run of the LIGO/VIRGO collaboration. Numerous numerical-relativity simulations of merging neutron star binaries have been performed during the last decades, and the emitted gravitational wave profiles and the interior structure of the generated remnants have been analysed in detail. The consequences of a potential appearance of a hadron-quark phase transition in the interior region of the produced hypermassive neutron star and the evolution of its underlying matter in the phase diagram of quantum cromo dynamics will be in the focus of this article. It will be shown that the different density/temperature regions of the equation of state can be severely constrained by a measurement of the spectral properties of the emitted post-merger gravitational wave signal from a future binary compact star merger event.

Highlights

  • When Albert Einstein in 1915 presented his General Theory of Relativity (GR) to the scientific community, not many physicists believed that his new theory of space–time deformation could replace the old Newtonian viewpoint of gravitation

  • One hundred years after Albert Einstein developed the theoretical groundings of black holes and gravitational waves, both entities have been observed

  • A gravitational wave event from a binary neutron star merger was detected in August 2017 by the LIGO/VIRGO collaboration (GW170817) and, with the analysis of the corresponding gravitational wave signal, the equation of state of elementary matter could be constrained severely

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Summary

Introduction

When Albert Einstein in 1915 presented his General Theory of Relativity (GR) to the scientific community, not many physicists believed that his new theory of space–time deformation could replace the old Newtonian viewpoint of gravitation. The understanding of the conjunction of the GW170817 event with the emitted gamma-ray burst GRB170817A and its associated kilonova, and the prediction of the post-merger gravitational wave profiles from BNS mergers are dominated by the results of numerical simulations, which solve the hydrodynamic evolution of elementary dense and hot matter on a curved space–time grid using the field equations of GR. A large number of numerical-relativity simulations of merging neutron star binaries have been performed over the last years and the emitted GWs and the interior structure of the generated SMNS/HMNS have been analyzed in detail. Based on these large number of numerical-relativity simulations, the emitted.

GW170817—The Long-Awaited Event
Hypermassive Neutron Stars and the QCD Phase Diagram
Detecting the Hadron-Quark Phase Transition with Gravitational Waves
Summary and Outlook
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