Detecting gravitational waves from mountains on neutron stars in the advanced detector era

Abstract

Rapidly rotating neutron stars (NSs) in low-mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs) are thought to be interesting sources of gravitational waves (GWs) for current and next generation ground-based detectors, such as Advanced LIGO and the Einstein Telescope. The main reason is that many of the NSs in these systems appear to be spinning well below their Keplerian break-up frequency, and it has been suggested that torques associated with GW emission may be setting the observed spin period. This assumption has been used extensively in the literature to assess the strength of the likelyGWsignal. There is now, however, a significant amount of theoretical and observation work that suggests that this may not be ..