Can magnetic fields be detected during the inspiral of binary neutron stars?

Using accurate and fully general-relativistic simulations we assess the effect that magnetic fields have on the gravitational-wave emission produced during the inspiral and merger of magnetized neutron stars. In particular, we show that magnetic fields have an impact after the merger, because they are amplified by a Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, but also during the inspiral, most likely because the magnetic tension reduces the stellar tidal deformation for extremely large initial magnetic fields, B-0 greater than or similar to 10(17) G. We quantify the influence of magnetic fields by computing the overlap, O, between the waveforms produced during the inspiral by magnetized and unmagnetized binaries. We find that for any realistic magnetic field strength B-0 less than or similar to 10(14) G the overlap during the inspiral is O greater than or similar to 0.999 and is quite insensitive to the mass of the neutron stars. Only for unrealistically large magnetic fields like B-0 similar or equal to 10(17) G the overlap does decrease noticeably, becoming at our resolutions O less than or similar to 0.76/0.67 for stars with baryon masses M-b similar or equal to 1.4/1.6M(circle dot), respectively. Because neutron stars are expected to merge with magnetic fields similar to 10(8)-10(10) G and because present detectors are sensitive to O less than or similar to 0.995, we conclude that it is very unlikely that the present detectors will be able to discern the presence of magnetic fields during the inspiral of neutron stars.