  The recent direct detection of gravitational waves (GWs) from binary black
hole mergers (2016, Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, no. 6, 061102; no. 24, 241103) opens
up an entirely new non-electromagnetic window into the Universe making it
possible to probe physics that has been hidden or dark to electromagnetic
observations. In addition to cataclysmic events involving black holes, GWs can
be triggered by physical processes and systems involving neutron stars.
Properties of neutron stars are largely determined by the equation of state
(EOS) of neutron-rich matter, which is the major ingredient in calculating the
stellar structure and properties of related phenomena, such as gravitational
wave emission from elliptically deformed pulsars and neutron star binaries.
Although the EOS of neutron-rich matter is still rather uncertain mainly due to
the poorly known density dependence of nuclear symmetry energy at high
densities, significant progress has been made recently in constraining the
symmetry energy using data from terrestrial nuclear laboratories. These
constraints could provide useful information on the limits of GWs expected from
neutron stars. Here after briefly reviewing our previous work on constraining
gravitational radiation from elliptically deformed pulsars with terrestrial
nuclear laboratory data in light of the recent gravitational wave detection, we
estimate the maximum gravitational wave strain amplitude, using an optimistic
value for the breaking strain of the neutron star crust, for 15 pulsars at
distances 0.16 kpc to 0.91 kpc from Earth, and find it to be in the range of
$\sim[0.2-31.1]\times 10^{-24}$, depending on the details of the EOS used to
compute the neutron star properties. Implications are discussed.
