The role of binding energies of neutron stars on the accretion-driven evolution

Abstract

Millisecond pulsars are believed to descend from low-mass X-ray binaries. Observable parameters of binary millisecond pulsars, e.g. mass of the pulsar, mass of the companion, spin period of the pulsar, orbital period, orbital eccentricity, etc., are used to probe the past accretion history of the millisecond pulsars. However, unfortunately in these studies the binding energy of the neutron star is not commonly considered. We show that the effect of the binding energy is significant in the estimation of the amount of mass accretion, and thus should be incorporated in models for binary evolutions. Moreover, different equations of state for dense matter give different values for the accreted mass for the same amount of increase in the gravitational mass of the neutron star, implying the need of constraining dense matter equations of state even to understand the spin-up procedure properly. © 2011 The Authors. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society © 2011 RAS.