Systematic effects from black hole-neutron star waveform model uncertainties on the neutron star equation of state

Understand

We identify various contributors of systematic effects in the measurement of the neutron star (NS) tidal deformability and quantify their magnitude for several types of neutron star - black hole (NSBH) binaries.

• Gravitational waves from NSBH mergers contain information about the components' masses and spins as well as the NS equation of state.
• Extracting this information requires comparison of the signal in noisy detector data with theoretical templates derived from some combination of post-Newtonian (PN) approximants, effective one-body (EOB) models and %analytic fits to numerical relativity (NR) simulations.
• The accuracy of these templates is limited by errors in the NR simulations, by the approximate nature of the PN/EOB waveforms, and by the hybridization procedure used to combine them.