Neutron star mergers as laboratories for extreme physics

Stephan Rosswog (University of Hamburg, Germany)

With the  advent of gravitational wave-based multi-messenger astrophysics, the next decade holds an enormous promise to achieve major progress for a number of long-standing problems. To name just a few, these include a census of the merging compact object populations, the sources of the heaviest elements in the Universe, the properties of matter at extreme densities and temperatures, the sources of gamma-ray bursts and potential modifications of Einstein's theory of General Relativity.

With the availability of a broad spectrum of observational information comes an increasing demand on the realism of the theoretical modelling of neutron star mergers, both in terms of including physical processes and in terms of spanning large length and time scales. In this talk I will provide an overview over our current understanding of these extreme-physics events.