English

Quantifying the Information Gain from Future High-Precision Radius Measurements for Identifying Twin Neutron Stars

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2026-07-20 v1 Astrophysics of Galaxies Solar and Stellar Astrophysics Nuclear Experiment Nuclear Theory

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 1.4M1.4\,M_\odot NS. Radius uncertainties are varied from the current level of about 0.90.9 km to the 0.1\approx 0.1 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 ΔR\Delta R 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 σR0.6\sigma_R \gtrsim 0.6 km, a rapid information-gain regime for 0.2σR0.60.2 \lesssim \sigma_R \lesssim 0.6 km, and an information-saturation regime for σR0.2\sigma_R \lesssim 0.2 km. These complementary analyses consistently indicate that radius measurements with a precision of about 0.20.2 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.

Keywords

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