No Arabic abstract
We present twelve new simulations of unequal mass neutron star mergers. The simulations were preformed with the SpEC code, and utilize nuclear-theory based equations of state and a two-moment gray neutrino transport scheme with an improved energy estimate based on evolving the number density. We model the neutron stars with the SFHo, LS220 and DD2 equations of state (EOS) and we study the neutrino and matter emission of all twelve models to search for robust trends between binary parameters and emission characteristics. We find that the total mass of the dynamical ejecta exceeds $0.01M_odot$ only for SFHo with weak dependence on the mass-ratio across all models. We find that the ejecta have a broad electron fraction ($Y_e$) distribution ($approx 0.06-0.48$), with mean $0.2$. $Y_e$ increases with neutrino irradiation over time, but decreases with increasing binary asymmetry. We also find that the models have ejecta with a broad asymptotic velocity distribution ($approx 0.05-0.7c$). The average velocity lies in the range $0.2c - 0.3c$ and decreases with binary asymmetry. Furthermore, we find that disk mass increases with binary asymmetry and stiffness of the EOS. The $Y_e$ of the disk increases with softness of the EOS. The strongest neutrino emission occurs for the models with soft EOS. For (anti) electron neutrinos we find no significant dependence of the magnitude or angular distribution or neutrino luminosity with mass-ratio. The heavier neutrino species have a luminosity dependence on mass-ratio but an angular distribution which does not change with mass-ratio.
We present three-dimensional simulations of the dynamics of binary neutron star (BNS) mergers from the late stage of the inspiral process up to $sim 20$ ms after the system has merged, either to form a hyper-massive neutron star (NS) or a rotating black hole (BH). We investigate five equal-mass models of total gravitational mass $2.207$, $2.373$, $2.537$, $2.697$ and $2.854 M_odot$, respectively, and four unequal mass models with $M_{mathrm{ADM}}simeq 2.53 M_odot$ and $qsimeq 0.94$, $0.88$, $0.82$, and $0.77$ (where $q = M^{(1)}/M^{(2)}$ is the mass ratio). We use a semi-realistic equation of state (EOS) namely, the seven-segment piece-wise polytropic SLyPP with a thermal component given by $Gamma_{th} = 1.8$. We have also compared the resulting dynamics (for one model) using both, the BSSN-NOK and CCZ4 methods for the evolution of the gravitational sector, and also different reconstruction methods for the matter sector, namely PPM, WENO and MP5. Our results show agreement and high resolution, but superiority of BSSN-NOK supplemented by WENO reconstruction at lower resolutions. One of the important characteristics of the present investigation is that, for the first time, this has been done using only publicly available open source software, in particular, the Einstein Toolkit code deployed for the dynamical evolution and the LORENE code for the generation of the initial models. All of the source code and parameters used for the simulations have been made publicly available. This not only makes it possible to re-run and re-analyze our data; it also enables others to directly build upon this work for future research.
As current gravitational wave (GW) detectors increase in sensitivity, and particularly as new instruments are being planned, there is the possibility that ground-based GW detectors will observe GWs from highly eccentric neutron star binaries. We present the first detailed study of highly eccentric BNS systems with full (3+1)D numerical relativity simulations using consistent initial conditions, i.e., setups which are in agreement with the Einstein equations and with the equations of general relativistic hydrodynamics in equilibrium. Overall, our simulations cover two different equations of state (EOSs), two different spin configurations, and three to four different initial eccentricities for each pairing of EOS and spin. We extract from the simulated waveforms the frequency of the f-mode oscillations induced during close encounters before the merger of the two stars. The extracted frequency is in good agreement with f-mode oscillations of individual stars for the irrotational cases, which allows an independent measure of the supranuclear equation of state not accessible for binaries on quasi-circular orbits. The energy stored in these f-mode oscillations can be as large as $10^{-3}M_odot sim 10^{51}$ erg, even with a soft EOS. In order to estimate the stored energy, we also examine the effects of mode mixing due to the stars offset from the origin on the f-mode contribution to the GW signal. While in general (eccentric) neutron star mergers produce bright electromagnetic counterparts, we find that the luminosity decreases when the eccentricity becomes too large, due to a decrease of the ejecta mass. Finally, the use of consistent initial configurations also allows us to produce high-quality waveforms for different eccentricities which can be used as a testbed for waveform model development of highly eccentric binary neutron star systems.
We continue our study of the binary neutron star parameter space by investigating the effect of the spin orientation on the dynamics, gravitational wave emission, and mass ejection during the binary neutron star coalescence. We simulate seven different configurations using multiple resolutions to allow a reasonable error assessment. Due to the particular choice of the setups, five configurations show precession effects, from which two show a precession (wobbling) of the orbital plane, while three show a bobbing motion, i.e., the orbital angular momentum does not precess, while the orbital plane moves along the orbital angular momentum axis. Considering the ejection of mass, we find that precessing systems can have an anisotropic mass ejection, which could lead to a final remnant kick of $sim 40 rm km/s$ for the studied systems. Furthermore, for the chosen configurations, antialigned spins lead to larger mass ejecta than aligned spins, so that brighter electromagnetic counterparts could be expected for these configurations. Finally, we compare our simulations with the precessing, tidal waveform approximant IMRPhenomPv2_NRTidalv2 and find good agreement between the approximant and our numerical relativity waveforms with phase differences below 1.2 rad accumulated over the last $sim$ 16 gravitational wave cycles.
With the recent advent of multi-messenger gravitational-wave astronomy and in anticipation of more sensitive, next-generation gravitational-wave detectors, we investigate the dynamics, gravitational-wave emission, and nucleosynthetic yields of numerous eccentric binary neutron-star mergers having different equations of state. For each equation of state we vary the orbital properties around the threshold of immediate merger, as well as the binary mass ratio. In addition to a study of the gravitational-wave emission including $f$-mode oscillations before and after merger, we couple the dynamical ejecta output from the simulations to the nuclear-reaction network code texttt{SkyNet} to compute nucleosynthetic yields and compare to the corresponding results in the case of a quasi-circular merger. We find that the amount and velocity of dynamically ejected material is always much larger than in the quasi-circular case, reaching maximal values of $M_{rm ej, max} sim 0.1 , M_{odot}$ and $v_{rm max}/c sim 0.75$. At the same time, the properties of this material are rather insensitive to the details of the orbit, such as pericenter distance or post-encounter apoastron distance. Furthermore, while the composition of the ejected matter depends on the orbital parameters and on the equation of state, the relative nucleosynthetic yields do not, thus indicating that kilonova signatures could provide information on the orbital properties of dynamically captured neutron-star binaries.
Only numerical relativity simulations can capture the full complexities of binary black hole mergers. These simulations, however, are prohibitively expensive for direct data analysis applications such as parameter estimation. We present two new fast and accurate surrogate models for the outputs of these simulations: the first model, NRSur7dq4, predicts the gravitational waveform and the second model, RemnantModel, predicts the properties of the remnant black hole. These models extend previous 7-dimensional, non-eccentric precessing models to higher mass ratios, and have been trained against 1528 simulations with mass ratios $qleq4$ and spin magnitudes $chi_1,chi_2 leq 0.8$, with generic spin directions. The waveform model, NRSur7dq4, which begins about 20 orbits before merger, includes all $ell leq 4$ spin-weighted spherical harmonic modes, as well as the precession frame dynamics and spin evolution of the black holes. The final black hole model, RemnantModel, models the mass, spin, and recoil kick velocity of the remnant black hole. In their training parameter range, both models are shown to be more accurate than existing models by at least an order of magnitude, with errors comparable to the estimated errors in the numerical relativity simulations. We also show that the surrogate models work well even when extrapolated outside their training parameter space range, up to mass ratios $q=6$.