Unveiling the equation of state of nuclear matter with binary neutron stars

2015 marked the hundred anniversary of Albert Einstein's lecture at the Prussian Academy of Science in which he introduced, for the first time, the famous field equations which became the core of his theory of general relativity. This masterpiece of 20th century science has proven extremely solid in all its predictions from the precession of the perihelion of Mercury to the observation of gravitational lensing in distant galaxies, to the more mundane time-delay corrections required by the global positioning system. One last piece of the puzzle is although still missing and comprise the direct measurement of the gravitational wave (GW) radiation emitted by any accelerating mass. These ripples in the spacetime fabric are extremely weak even when produced in the most extreme of the conditions as the ones present during the mergers of two black holes or neutron stars. For this reason they have eluded experimental scientists for almost four decades. But things are about to change, last year a new array of advanced gravitational wave detectors, namely advanced LIGO and Virgo came online in late September and they are expected to observe up to 40 events per year involving the mergers of two compact objects. Despite the high sensitivity of this generation of ground base interferometers, it is still necessary to use accurate gravitational waveforms models to extract all the information from the signal produced by the detector. In this project we focus on the merger of two neutron stars which orbit together in a binary system. The nonlinear nature of the Einstein equations coupled with the complex microphysics behind neutron star matter requires the use of sophisticated codes which uses advanced numerical techniques to produce accurate results. By using the GW signals calculated in our numerical simulations we will be able to strongly link the properties of neutron star matter to a precise set of observable frequencies from the detector. This information, together with the electromagnetic counterparts of these events, will shed some light on the engine that powers short gamma ray bursts. The properties of matter at the ultra high densities and low temperatures reached inside neutron stars cannot be observed in a conventional laboratory on Earth and for this reason accurate GW astronomy is a unique opportunity to constraint the current knowledge of the equation of state that describes these regimes. But GWs are not the only observable that can be linked to the equation of state of neutron star matter, during the violent merger of two neutron stars large amount of neutron rich material is ejected leading to the creation of heavy elements. While undergoing radioactive decay, these elements emit in near-infrared and optical bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. The characteristics of these emissions are strongly affected by the composition, temperature and total mass of the dynamically ejected material and for this reason we have developed a series of cutting-edge methods to simulate in full general relativity the inspiral, merger and collapse including relativistic hydrodynamics, the use of nuclear finite-temperature equations of state and an approximate treatment of neutrino emission and absorption. Such simulations require the use of computational facilities such as the one at LRZ where we make use of thousands of CPUs every week for each of our simulations and producing several terabytes of data. This data are processed in situ at the LRZ facility and, for a more detailed analysis, transferred to our local cluster in Frankfurt am Main (LOEWE).