Gravitational waves from holographic neutron star mergers

Abstract

We present simulations of binary neutron star mergers with equations of state (EoSs) that have input from holography, and analyze the spectral properties of the resulting waveforms. These EoSs consist of a standard nuclear matter EoS at low densities, transitioning to a state-of-the-art holographic EoS with first-order deconfinement phase transition in the otherwise intractable high-density regime. Depending on the transition density, the characteristic frequencies in the spectrum produced from the hybrid EoSs are shifted to significantly lower values. Equal-mass binaries with a total mass of 2.8 M ⊙ reach densities in the quark matter phase in the core of the transient hypermassive neutron star, which then induces an immediate gravitational collapse.