Neutron star mergers as a probe of modifications of general relativity with finite-range scalar forces

Understand

Observations of gravitational radiation from compact binary systems provide an unprecedented opportunity to test General Relativity in the strong field dynamical regime.

• In this paper, we investigate how future observations of gravitational radiation from binary neutron star mergers might provide constraints on finite-range forces from a universally coupled massive scalar field.
• Such scalar degrees of freedom are a characteristic feature of many extensions of General Relativity.
• For concreteness, we work in the context of metric $f(R)$ gravity, which is equivalent to General Relativity and a universally coupled scalar field with a non-linear potential whose form is fixed by the choice of $f(R)$.