Determination of neutron star radius from pulse profile modeling using profile likelihood

In recent years, NICER data has been extensively used to determine neutron star radius and mass using pulse profile modeling. The pulse profile modeling is implemented with the X-PSI package and best-fit parameters are obtained using Bayesian inference. Using synthetic data, we demonstrate the application of frequentist inference to determine the neutron star radius, where the nuisance parameters are treated using profile likelihood. We find that the profile likelihood technique can recover the true radius to < 1 sigma. Its precision is also comparable to that of Bayesian analysis while being computationally much faster. Therefore, this work serves as a proof-of-principle application of frequentist inference to determine neutron star radius using pulse profile modeling and complements the Bayesian inference technique used. We have also made our analysis codes for frequentist inference using X-PSI publicly available.