Reconnection-Powered Fast Radio Transients from Coalescing Neutron Star Binaries
Creators
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1.
California Institute of Technology
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2.
University of Maryland, College Park
Abstract
It is an open question whether and how gravitational wave events involving neutron stars can be preceded by electromagnetic counterparts. This Letter shows that the collision of two neutron stars with magnetic fields well below magnetar-level strengths can produce millisecond fast-radio-burst-like transients. Using global force-free electrodynamics simulations, we identify the coherent emission mechanism that might operate in the common magnetosphere of a binary neutron star system prior to merger. We predict that the emission show have frequencies in the range of 10–20 GHz for magnetic fields of 𝐵*=10¹¹ G at the surfaces of the stars.
Copyright and License
© 2023 American Physical Society.
Acknowledgement
The authors are grateful for discussions with K. Cleary, G. Hallinan, M. Lyutikov, B. Metzger, K. Mooley, J. Nättilä, E. Quataert, and J. Stone. E. R. M. gratefully acknowledges support from a joint fellowship at the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science, the Princeton Gravity Initiative and the Institute for Advanced Study. The simulations were performed on the NSF Frontera supercomputer under Grants AST20008 and AST21006. A. P. acknowledges support by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. AST-1909458. This work was performed in part at the Aspen Center for Physics, which is supported by National Science Foundation grant PHY-1607611, and was facilitated by Multimessenger Plasma Physics Center (MPPC), NSF Grant No. PHY-2206607. E. R. M. also acknowledges the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) [79] through Expanse at SDSC and Bridges-2 at PSC through allocations PHY210053 and PHY210074. E. R. M. further acknowledges the use of computational resources managed and supported by Princeton Research Computing, a consortium of groups including the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering (PICSciE) and the Office of Information Technology’s High Performance Computing Center and Visualization Laboratory at Princeton University. E. R. M. also acknowledges the use of high-performance computing at the Institute for Advanced Study. This work has made extensive use of a number of software packages. Those include amrex [80], matplotlib [81], numpy [82], and scipy [83].
Files
PhysRevLett.130.245201.pdf
Additional details
Identifiers
Related works
- Is new version of
- Discussion Paper: arXiv:2207.14435 (arXiv)
Funding
- Princeton University
- Institute for Advanced Study
- NSF
- AST-20008
- NSF
- AST-21006
- NSF
- AST-1909458
- NSF
- PHY-1607611
- NSF
- PHY-210053
- NSF
- PHY-210074
Dates
- Accepted
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2023-04-17
Caltech Custom Metadata
- Publication Status
- Published