astro-ph.HENov 4, 2026

Unsupervised Neural Operators for Rotating Relativistic Stars: High-Fidelity Equation of State Inference and Pulsar Spin Evolution at Scale

Authors: Anarya Ray

Organizations: Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA), Northwestern University, 1800 Sherman Ave, Evanston, IL 60201, USA · NSF-Simons AI Institute for the Sky (SkAI), 172 E. Chestnut Street, Chicago, IL 60611, USA

Abstract

Observed populations of rotating neutron stars~(NSs) with millisecond-order periods are powerful probes of fundamental physics. Mass-radius measurements inform poorly constrained properties of degenerate nuclear matter, whereas high-fidelity population synthesis connects unknowns in NS formation and binary evolution to large radio-timing surveys. However, repeated structure calculations are prohibitive due to the computational cost of solving the highly coupled partial differential equations of axisymmetric general relativistic hydrostatic equilibrium that govern rotating NS interiors. Non-rotating calculations or approximate rotational corrections can bias equation of state inference and limit the fidelity of population synthesis in tracing the evolutionary history of progenitors and propagating equation of state uncertainties. In this Letter, we develop physics-informed neural operators that can solve the axisymmetric problem with high accuracy and negligible computational cost. \textit{Our solvers are trained in a fully unsupervised setting, with the training objective informed solely by the partial differential equations, and achieve a 103×10^3\times speed-up with negligible accuracy loss}. These solvers enable scalable EoS inference that self-consistently accounts for rotation and repeated stellar-structure calculations during binary evolution, making spin predictions that account for rotational structure and EoS uncertainties computationally accessible to population synthesis.

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