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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 March 2016
The most important recent observational discoveries in the field of X-ray binaries are probably those of the slow pulsars and of the winds of normal early-type main-sequence stars. These facts yield key information on the evolutionary history of the X-ray binaries and on the rotational slow-down mechanism for a neutron star in a stellar wind, as will be pointed out in section 3. In the theoretical field, the X-ray binaries have triggered much fundamental work, notably on the detailed processes of mass transfer and on tidal evolution, which will be considered in sections 2, 4 and 5.