Hunting for continuous gravitational waves from unknown neutron stars in binary systems in Advanced LIGO data

Non-axisymmetric, rapidly rotating neutron stars are predicted to emit quasi-monochromatic gravitational waves. Accretion from a companion star may drive asymmetries of the neutron star causing it to emit gravitational waves, perhaps even after accretion has subsided. Searching for unknown sources in binary systems is a significant computational challenge. In this talk, I will describe a search method, called TwoSpect, that has been developed to search for unknown sources in binary systems; show results from the TwoSpect search of initial LIGO/Virgo data; describe recent improvements to TwoSpect and other semi-coherent methods; and provide an outlook on TwoSpect searches in the advanced detector era.