Pinned vortex hopping in a neutron star crust

Abstract

The motion of superfluid vortices in a neutron star crust is at the heart of most theories of pulsar glitches. Pinning of vortices to ions can decouple the superfluid from the crust and create a reservoir of angular momentum. Sudden large-scale unpinning can lead to an observable glitch. In this paper, we investigate the scattering of a free vortex off a pinning potential and calculate its mean free path, in order to assess whether unpinned vortices can skip multiple pinning sites and come close enough to their neighbours to trigger avalanches, or whether they simply hop from one pinning site to its neighbour, giving rise to a more gradual creep. We find that there is a significant range of ..