On the Testability of the Quark-Hadron Transition Using Gravitational Waves From Merging Binary Neutron Stars

Understand

Elementary particles such as quarks and gluons are expected to be fundamental degrees of freedom at ultra high temperatures or densities, while natural phenomena in our daily lives are described in terms of hadronic degrees of freedom.

• Massive neutron stars and remnants of binary neutron star mergers may contain quark matter, but it is not known how the transition from hadron matter to quark matter occurs.
• Different transition scenarios predict different gravitational waveforms emitted from binary neutron star mergers.
• If the difference between the equations of state occurs at sufficiently high density, it is expected that the difference between waveforms mainly appears in the merger or the post-merger phase rather than in the inspiral phase.