Systematic Effects of Hydrogen and Helium Atmosphere Mismatch on Radius Inference in PSR~J0740+6620-like Synthetic NICER Data — E8 Intelligence Research

Constraints on neutron star radii provide insight into the properties of the cold, dense matter in their interiors. Previous studies using synthetic Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) pulse waveform data have demonstrated that radius inferences derived therefrom are robust against several classes of modeling systematics. Here we explore the consequences of assuming the wrong atmospheric composition, using synthetic data based on the $\sim 2.1~M_\odot$ pulsar PSR~J0740$+$6620. We find that the assumption of a hydrogen atmosphere when the synthetic data assumed a helium atmosphere, or vice versa, produces little bias in the inferred radius at the spot-to-background ratio of the actual PSR~J0740$+$6620 data. However, when we increase the spot-to-background ratio by a factor of $\sim20$ while keeping the total number of counts fixed at the observed $\sim 5.5\times 10^5$, we find that composition mismatch can produce significantly biased radius estimates while remaining hidd Author: Andrew Stewart Caldin, Independent Researcher, UK. Part of the E8 Intelligence Research series. Platform: e8intelligence.com