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 Ksym,0. We further combine the tidal measurement of the binary neutron star merger GW170817 by LIGO/Virgo to derive a joint 1-σ constraint as Ksym,0 = -102+71-72 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.
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