Prospects for the inference of inertial modes from hypermassive neutron stars with future gravitational-wave detectors

Abstract

Some recent, long-term numerical simulations of binary neutron star mergers have shown that the long-lived remnants produced in such mergers might be affected by convective instabilities. Those would trigger the excitation of inertial modes, providing a potential method to improve our understanding of the rotational and thermal properties of neutron stars through the analysis of the modes’ imprint in the late postmerger gravitational-wave signal. In this paper, we assess the detectability of those modes by injecting numerically generated postmerger waveforms into colored Gaussian noise of second-generation and future detectors. Signals are recovered using BayesWave, a Bayesian data-analysis algorithm that reconstructs them through a morphology-independent approach using series of sine-Gaussian wavelets. Our study reveals that current interferometers (i.e., the Hanford-Livingston-Virgo network) recover the peak frequency of inertial modes only if the merger occurs at distances of up to 1 Mpc. For future detectors such as the Einstein Telescope, the range of detection increases by about a factor 10.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Miquel Miravet-Tenés: orcid.org/0000-0002-8766-1156

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