Breaking bad degeneracies with Love relations: Improving gravitational-wave measurements through universal relations

Understand

The distance-inclination degeneracy limits gravitational-wave parameter estimation of compact binary mergers.

• Although the degeneracy can be partially broken by including higher-order modes or precession, these effects are suppressed in binary neutron stars.
• In this work, we implement a new parametrization of the tidal effects in the binary neutron-star waveform, exploiting the binary Love relations, that breaks the distance-inclination degeneracy.
• The binary Love relations prescribe the tidal deformability of a neutron star as a function of its source-frame mass in an equation-of-state insensitive way and, thus, allows direct measurement of the redshift of the source.