  The LIGO-Virgo collaboration ground-breaking detection of the binary
neutron-star merger event, GW170817, has intensified efforts towards the
understanding of the equation of state (EoS) of nuclear matter. In this letter,
we compare directly the density-pressure constraint on the EoS obtained from a
recent analysis of the neutron-star merger event to density-pressure
constraints obtained from nuclear physics experiments. To relate constraints
from nuclear physics to the radii and the tidal deformabilities of neutron
stars, we use a large collection of Skyrme density functionals that describe
properties of nuclei to calculate properties of 1.4 solar maass neutron stars.
We find that restricting this set of Skyrme equations of state to density
functionals that describe nuclear masses, isobaric analog states, and low
energy nuclear reactions does not sufficiently restrict the predicted
neutron-star radii and the tidal deformabilities. Including pressure
constraints on the EoS around twice saturation density, obtained from high
energy nucleus-nucleus collisions, does constrain predicted radii and tidal
deformabilities to be consistent with the results obtained from the analysis of
GW170817. We discuss how new measurements of nucleus-nucleus collisions can
improve these constraints on the EoS to be more restrictive than the current
constraints from the GW170817 merger event.
