The NICER Collaboration recently reported the measurement of the mass and radius of a pulsar PSR J0030+0451. We here use this new measurement to constrain one of the higher-order nuclear matter parameters Ksym,0. We further combine the tidal measurement of the binary neutron star merger GW170817 by LIGO/Virgo to derive a joint 1-σ constraint as Ksym,0=−102−72+71 MeV. We believe this is the most reliable bound on the parameter to date under the assumption that there is no new physics above the saturation density which impacts neutron star observations.
@article{arxiv.2002.03210,
title = {Measuring Nuclear Matter Parameters with NICER and LIGO/Virgo},
author = {Josef Zimmerman and Zack Carson and Kristen Schumacher and Andrew W. Steiner and Kent Yagi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.03210},
year = {2020}
}