Tidal Deformability of Neutron Stars in Unimodular Gravity

Abstract

Unimodular gravity is a modified theory with respect to general relativity by an extra condition that the determinant of the metric is fixed. Especially, if the energy-momentum tensor is not imposed to be conserved separately, a new geometric structure will appear with potential observational signatures. In this paper, we study the tidal deformability of a compact star in unimodular gravity under the assumption of a non-conserved energy-momentum tensor. Both the electric-type and magnetic-type quadrupole tidal Love numbers are calculated for neutron stars using the polytrope model. It is found that the electric-type tidal Love numbers are monotonically increasing, but the magnetic-type ones are decreasing, with the increase in the non-conservation parameter. Compared with the observational data from the detected gravitational-wave events, a small negative non-conservation parameter is favored.

Keywords

• tidal Love number
• neutron star
• unimodular gravity