Radio-ejection and bump-related orbital period gap of millisecond binary pulsars

2005

The monotonic increase of the radius of low mass stars during their ascent on the red giant branch halts when they suffer a temporary contraction. This occurs when the hydrogen burning shell reaches the discontinuity in hydrogen content left from the maximum increase in the convective extension, at the time of the first dredge up, and produces a well known "bump" in the luminosity function of the red giants of globular clusters. If the giant is the mass losing component in a binary in which mass transfer occurs on the nuclear evolution time scale, this event produces a temporary stop in the mass transfer, which we will name "bump related" detachment. If the accreting companion is a neutron …