22–26 Jun 2026
Physics Department, University of Coimbra
Europe/Lisbon timezone

How effectively can Neural Posterior Estimation infer the Neutron Star Equation of State?

26 Jun 2026, 10:15
25m
Physics Department, University of Coimbra

Physics Department, University of Coimbra

Rua Larga, 3004-516 - Coimbra - Portugal

Speaker

Valéria Carvalho

Description

The equation of state (EoS) of neutron star matter encodes the relationship between pressure and density at supranuclear densities, fundamentally governing the star’s structure and observable macroscopic properties, such as mass, radius, and tidal deformability. In this work, we apply Neural Posterior Estimation (NPE) with conditional normalising flows to infer the EoS from synthetic observational data. We consider a model-agnostic EoS family and train our models on mock mass-radius
and mass-radius–tidal deformability datasets with varying noise levels. We evaluate reconstruction performance in terms of pressure and squared speed of sound across baryonic densities, and
quantify the impact of including tidal deformability information. Our results demonstrate that tidal
measurements significantly reduce inference uncertainty, particularly for pressure, and confirm that
NPE-based models can accurately capture physical constraints.

Authors

Constança Providência Michał Bejger (Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center) Márcio Ferreira (University of Coimbra) Valéria Carvalho

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