Extracting the cutoff frequency in the gravitational-wave spectrum of black hole-neutron star mergers

Abstract

The location of the cutoff in the gravitational-wave spectrum of black hole-neutron star mergers is correlated strongly with the neutron-star radius for the case that the neutron star is disrupted by the black hole during the merger. However, the modulation which appears in the spectrum due to the mode mixing makes it difficult to measure the cutoff frequency if gravitational waves are observed from inclined direction or the binary is precessing. In this letter, we show that the cutoff frequency can be measured even in such situations with a method we have recently proposed to reconstruct the face-on waveforms only from the strain observed from a particular direction. We show that the systematic error in the measurement of the neutron-star radius can be reduced to $\lesssim 5\%$ for the case that tidal disruption of the neutron star occurs significantly.