Probing internal dissipative processes of neutron stars with gravitational waves during the inspiral of neutron star binaries

Abstract: We study the impact of out-of-equilibrium, dissipative effects on the dynamics of inspiraling neutron stars. We find that modeling dissipative processes (such as those from the stars internal effective fluid viscosity) requires that one introduce a new tidal deformability parameter--the dissipative tidal deformability--which modifies the phase of gravitational waves emitted during the inspiral phase of a neutron star binary. We show that the dissipative tidal deformability corrects the gravitational-wave phase at 4 post-Newtonian order for quasi-circular binaries. This correction receives a large finite-size enhancement by the stellar compactness, analogous to the case of the tidal deformability. Moreover, the correction is not degenerate with the time of coalescence, which also enters at 4PN order, because it contains a logarithmic frequency-dependent contribution. Using a simple Fisher analysis, we show that physically allowed values for the dissipative tidal deformability may be constrained by measurements of the phase of emitted gravitational waves to roughly the same extent as the (electric-type, quadrupolar) tidal deformability. Finally, we show that there are no out-of-equilibrium, dissipative corrections to the tidal deformability itself. We conclude that there are at least two relevant tidal deformability parameters that can be constrained with gravitational-wave phase measurements during the late inspiral of a neutron star binary: one which characterizes the adiabatic tidal response of the star, and another which characterizes the leading-order out-of-equilibrium, dissipative tidal response. These findings open a window to probe dissipative processes in the interior of neutron stars with gravitational waves.