Measuring Nuclear Matter Parameters with NICER and LIGO/Virgo

Abstract

The NICER Collaboration recently reported the measurement of the mass and radius of a pulsar PSR J0030+0451. We here use this new measurement to constrain one of the higher-order nuclear matter parameters $K_{\mathrm{sym},0}$. We further combine the tidal measurement of the binary neutron star merger GW170817 by LIGO/Virgo to derive a joint 1-$\sigma$ constraint as $K_{\mathrm{sym},0}=-102_{-72}^{+71}$ MeV. We believe this is the most reliable bound on the parameter to date under the assumption that there is no new physics above the saturation density which impacts neutron star observations.

Comments: 6 pages, 4 figures