Gravitational waves from the final stages of inspiraling binary neutron stars are expected to be one of the most important sources for ground-based gravitational wave detectors. The masses of the components are determinable from the orbital and chirp frequencies during the early part of the evolution, and large finite-size (tidal) effects are measurable toward the end of inspiral, but the gravitational wave signal is expected to be very complex at this time. Tidal effects during the early part of the evolution will form a very small correction, but during this phase the signal is relatively clean. The accumulated phase shift due to tidal corrections is characterized by a single quantity related to a star’s tidal Love number. The Love number is sensitive, in particular, to the compactness parameter $M/R$ and the star’s internal structure, and its determination could provide an important constraint to the neutron star radius. We show that Love numbers of self-bound strange quark matter stars are qualitatively different from those of normal neutron stars. Observations of the tidal signature from coalescing compact binaries could therefore provide an important, and possibly unique, way to distinguish self-bound strange quark stars from normal neutron stars. Tidal signatures from self-bound strange quark stars with masses smaller than $1M_{\odot }$ are substantially smaller than those of normal stars owing to their smaller radii. Thus tidal signatures of stars less massive than $1M_{\odot }$ are probably not detectable with Advanced LIGO. For stars with masses in the range $1–2M_{\odot }$, the anticipated efficiency of the proposed Einstein telescope would be required for the detection of tidal signatures.

• Received 28 April 2010

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.82.024016