Nuclear physics with gravitational waves from neutron stars disrupted by black holes

Understand

Gravitational waves from neutron star-black hole (NSBH) mergers that undergo tidal disruption provide a potential avenue to study the equation of state of neutron stars and hence the behaviour of matter at its most extreme densities.

• We present a phenomenological model for the gravitational-wave signature of tidal disruption, which allows us to measure the disruption time.
• We carry out a study with mock data, assuming an optimistically nearby NSBH event with parameters optimised for measuring the tidal disruption.
• We show that a two-detector network of 40 km Cosmic Explorer instruments can measure the time of disruption with a precision of 0.5 ms, which corresponds to a constraint on the neutron star radius of 0.7 km (90\% credibility).