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Lars Bildsten (Institute for Theoretical Physics, UC-Santa Barbara)
The Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer has found that most rapidly accreting and weakly magnetic neutron stars are rotating near 300 Hertz. I will discuss the exciting possibility that these stars are rotating fast enough so that, on average, the angular momentum added by accretion is lost to gravitational radiation. Gravitational wave emission from deformations of less than a part in 107 can halt their spin-up! The resulting gravity wave strength is <10-26 from most neutron stars and >2 \times 10-26 for Scorpius X-1. Prior knowledge of the position and spin frequency will allow for deep searches for these periodic signals with gravitational wave interferometers (i.e. LIGO). Such quadrupolar gravitational wave emission frustrates the accretion-driven spin-scenario for millisecond radio pulsars and suggests that upcoming searches will find few pulsars that rotate more rapidly than a few milliseconds.