Comparison of Spectral Representations of the Neutron Star Equation of State

The Equation of State (EoS) for the dense matter which makes up a Neutron Star (NS) is still an incomplete story. Investigations into the physical properties of this EoS remain vital to understand the micro- and macrophysics governing NS behaviour and their astrophysical observables. In this project we explore the use of spectral methods to represent a generic NS EoS, with a focus on comparing the performance and precision between using a Chebychev polynomial basis over the more commonly used power series expansion. We will also investigate the impact of varying the polynomial order on our ability to infer the EoS, as implemented in the Bayesian inference package Bilby, when analysing both simulated and real gravitational wave data containing Binary Neutron Star coalescences.