Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2014
Volume 59, Number 5
Saturday–Tuesday, April 5–8, 2014; Savannah, Georgia
Session X3: Invited Session: Gravitational Waves and Nuclear Astrophysics |
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Sponsoring Units: DNP GGR Chair: Jocelyn Read, California State University, Fullerton Room: Chatham Ballroom B |
Tuesday, April 8, 2014 10:45AM - 11:21AM |
X3.00001: Merging ``real'' neutron stars for gravitational waves and electromagnetic counterparts Invited Speaker: Matthew Duez Having more-or-less succeeded in learning to stably evolve Einstein's equations, numerical relativity is taking the leap to including the physics of neutron stars, which will enable us to construct truly realistic pictures of neutron star-neutron star and black hole-neutron star binary mergers. The neutron star profile affects late inspirals and mergers, leaving its imprint on gravitational waveforms and electromagnetic counterpart signals. Furthermore, we expect neutrino radiation, magnetic field, and nuclear recombination effects to drive the post-merger evolution. In this talk, I will describe some recent neutron star merger simulations combining nuclear physics and general relativity. The goal is to connect assumptions about the nuclear equation of state and the premerger binary to resulting binary trajectories, matter outflows, accretion disk dynamics, and neutrino energy output. These can then hopefully be connected to observable signals in the form of gravitational waves, kilonovae, and gamma ray bursts. It is found that an interesting variety of disks, outflows, and neutrino bursts are possible. Connections to observables are being attempted by tracking nuclear reactions in tidal ejecta and estimating energy injection to gamma ray bursts from neutrino annihilation and other sources. Meanwhile, non-vacuum inspiral simulations are finally approaching the length and accuracy needed for interesting comparisons with binary black hole waveforms and post-Newtonian predictions, these being steps toward a reliable characterization of the imprint of the nuclear equation of state on the gravitational waves. [Preview Abstract] |
Tuesday, April 8, 2014 11:21AM - 11:57AM |
X3.00002: Neutron Star Structure, Neutron-rich Matter, and Gravitational Waves Invited Speaker: Andrew Steiner In addition to opening a new window on the universe, the detection of gravitational waves will have important implications for nuclear physics. In particular, gravitational waves from neutron star mergers contain important information about the structure of neutron stars - which are our best probes of QCD at non-perturbative densities. I will briefly review what we can learn about neutron star structure from gravitational waves and compare that with what we have learned recently from electromagnetic observations. A careful combination of these two types of data will bring us closer to answering one of the fundamental questions about high-density QCD: what are the best degrees of freedom for describing matter above the nuclear saturation density? Also, neutron star mergers are promising sites of r-process nucleosynthesis, and gravitational waves signals may help us understand how much r-process material comes from mergers as opposed to neutrino driven winds. R-process material in mergers originates near the neutrinosphere, a region very sensitive to the nuclear physics input. [Preview Abstract] |
Tuesday, April 8, 2014 11:57AM - 12:33PM |
X3.00003: Electromagnetic signatures of Neutron Star Mergers Invited Speaker: Daniel Kasen |
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