Collaborative Research: Compact Binary Mergers in the Advanced LIGO Era

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A new window on the universe opened recently with the detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO gravitational wave observatory. Other telescopes observe electromagnetic waves (that includes visible light), and this new window will give us quite different and complementary information. The work described here seeks to understand better how to get the most information from these gravitational wave observations. In particular, we study the very violent merger of neutron stars and black holes to determine how the properties of these systems are encoded in both gravitational and electromagnetic waves.The goals supported by this award are to study the dynamics of compact objects and the radiation they emit to capture the most science possible from aLIGO and similar detectors. We will do so through computational studies of binary systems incorporating magnetized matter with resistive effects, realistic equations of state, electromagnetic and neutrino emission, and r-process nucleosynthesis. Our efforts will include the following: (i) We will determine gravitational waveforms from these binaries, with a focus on observable imprints from the neutron star equation of state, mass, and radius. (ii) We will investigate the construction of analytic and phenomenological gravitational wave templates. (iii) We will study outflows from merging binaries as an indicator of events with characteristic electromagnetic and neutrino signals. (iv) We will study the global behavior of magnetic fields and the electromagnetic emissions, such as jets, that originate in the magnetosphere of coalescing binaries.