Searching for evidence of measurable p-g mode instability in GW170817

It has been suggested by Weinberg et al. (2013) that an instability due to nonlinear coupling of a neutron star's tide to its pressure and gravity (p-g) modes could affect the gravitational-wave inspiral of a binary neutron star. Using a parameterized model for nonlinear tides from Essick et al. (2016) we search for evidence of measurable p-g modes using Bayesian inference. We investigate a measurability condition where we examine nonlinear tidal parameters that induce a gravitational wave phase shift at the innermost stable circular orbit greater than 0.1 radians. We find that this model is consistent with GW170817. We also investigate a stronger measurability condition where we search for nonlinear tides with a mismatch greater than 0.04 with a standard post-Newtonian waveform family.