Quantifying the Information Gain from Future High-Precision Radius Measurements for Identifying Twin Neutron Stars
Abstract
Twin neutron stars (NSs), characterized by identical gravitational masses but different radii, are among the most promising astrophysical signatures of a strong first-order hadron--quark phase transition in supradense matter. We investigate how increasingly precise NS radius measurements improve the Bayesian inference of twin-star observability using mock radius data for a canonical NS. Radius uncertainties are varied from the current level of about km to the km precision anticipated from future X-ray and gravitational-wave observations. We quantify the information gained using the posterior distribution of the maximum twin-star radius separation together with an analytical model of branch distinguishability and complementary information-theoretic measures based on the branch observational efficiency and the Shannon entropy. The combined analyses reveal three inference regimes: a prior-dominated regime for km, a rapid information-gain regime for km, and an information-saturation regime for km. These complementary analyses consistently indicate that radius measurements with a precision of about km already extract most of the information available for identifying twin NSs within the present Bayesian framework. Beyond establishing a quantitative observational benchmark for future high-precision radius measurements, this work provides a general Bayesian framework for quantifying the information gain from progressively more precise observations and identifying the point of diminishing scientific returns.
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Cite
@article{arxiv.2607.18124,
title = {Quantifying the Information Gain from Future High-Precision Radius Measurements for Identifying Twin Neutron Stars},
author = {Bao-An Li and Xavier Grundler},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.18124},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
8 pages including 5 figures