Revealing Phase Transition in Dense Matter with Gravitational Wave Spectroscopy of Binary Neutron Star Mergers

Pedro Luis Espino; Aviral Prakash; David Radice; Domenico Logoteta

doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.109.123009

Revealing Phase Transition in Dense Matter with Gravitational Wave Spectroscopy of Binary Neutron Star Mergers

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2026-01-13 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Authors: Pedro Luis Espino , Aviral Prakash , David Radice , Domenico Logoteta

View on arXiv ↗ PDF ↗ DOI ↗

Abstract

We use numerical relativity simulations of binary neutron star mergers to show that high density deconfinement phase transitions (PTs) to quark matter can be probed using multimodal postmerger gravitational wave (GW) spectroscopy. Hadron-quark PTs suppress the one-armed spiral instability in the remnant. This is manifested in an anti-correlation between the energy carried in the $l=2, m=1$ GW mode and energy density gap which separates the two phases. Consequently, a single measurement of the signal-to-noise ratios of the $l=2, m=1$ and $l=2, m=2$ GW modes could constrain the energy density gap of the PT.

Keywords

binary neutron star merger gravitational wave spectroscopy phase transition quark matter numerical relativity postmerger spiral instability

Cite

@article{arxiv.2301.03619,
  title  = {Revealing Phase Transition in Dense Matter with Gravitational Wave Spectroscopy of Binary Neutron Star Mergers},
  author = {Pedro Luis Espino and Aviral Prakash and David Radice and Domenico Logoteta},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.03619},
  year   = {2026}
}

Revealing Phase Transition in Dense Matter with Gravitational Wave Spectroscopy of Binary Neutron Star Mergers

Abstract

Keywords

Cite

Related papers