A Spectral Approach to the Relativistic Inverse Stellar Structure Problem

Author: Indik, Nathaniel Michael

Year: 2012

Degree: Senior thesis (Major)

Advisor: Lindblom, Lee A.

Committee Member: None, None

Option: Physics

DOI: 10.7907/829S-BX59

Abstract

We present a new method for solving the inverse stellar structure problem, which determines an expression for the high density range of the neutron star equation of state (EOS) based on observations of total masses, M, and radii, R of these stars. This approach determines spectral representations of the EOS that are very accurate and require only a few spectral parameters to converge. This method can determine the underlying high density EOS from just a few mass-radii observations {M_i, R_i}. While accurate mass-radii data are not available yet, we tested the accuracy of this method to determine the EOS from a set of {M_i, R_i} values computed from two tabulated theoretical EOS. When applied to the PAL6 [ 6] and MS 1 [7] tabulated EOS, this method converged to the original EOS to within a few percent using {M_i, R_i} data from only two stellar models.