Mountains on neutron stars

Some of the prime targets for interferometric gravitational wave detectors, such as LIGO and VIRGO, are deformed rotating neutron stars, both isolated and in accreting systems. I will focus on deformations due to strong interior magnetic fields and on crustal deformations and I shall present a perturbative formalism to calculate the shape of the star in both these cases. I shall discuss the implications for the detection of sources by LIGO and VIRGO, especially for the case of LMXBs, in which gravitational waves may be playing an important role. Modelling these gravitational wave emission mechanisms is, in fact, an important issue both for gravitational wave data analysis and for astrophysics as gravitational wave observations may also allow us to constrain accretion and stellar magnetic field models. I will also consider deformations of a solid core and discuss how, in this case, LIGO may be used to investigate an interesting region of QCD parameter space