Measurement of Tidal Deformability in the Gravitational Wave Parameter Estimation for Nonspinning Binary Neutron Star Mergers

Abstract

One of the main targets for ground-based gravitational wave (GW) detectors such as Advanced LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory) and Virgo is coalescences of neutron star (NS) binaries. Even though a NS’s macroscopic properties such as mass and radius have been obtained from electro-magnetic wave observations, its internal structure has been studied mainly by using theoretical approaches. However, with the advent of Advanced LIGO and Virgo, the tidal deformability of a NS, which depends on the internal structure of the NS, has been recently obtained from GW observations. Therefore, reducing the measurement error of tidal deformability as small as possible in the GW parameter estimation is important. In this study, we introduce a post-Newtonian (PN) gravitational waveform model in which the tidal deformability contribution appears from 5 PN order, and we use the Fisher matrix (FM) method to calculate parameter measurement errors. Because the FM is computed semi-analytically using the wave function, the measurement errors can be obtained much faster than those of practical parameter estimations based on Markov Chain Monte Carlo method. We investigate the measurement errors for mass and tidal deformability by applying the FM to the nonspinning TaylorF2 waveform model. We show that if the tidal deformability corrections are considered up to the 6 PN order, the measurement error for the dimensionless tidal deformability can be reduced to about 75% compared to that obtained by considering only the 5 PN order correction.