Journal article
Simulating pulsar glitches: an N-body solver for superfluid vortex motion in two dimensions
G Howitt, A Melatos, B Haskell
MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY | OXFORD UNIV PRESS | Published : 2020
Abstract
A rotating superfluid forms an array of quantized vortex lines that determine its angular velocity. The spasmodic evolution of the array under the influence of deceleration, dissipation, and pinning forces is thought to be responsible for the phenomenon of pulsar glitches, sudden jumps in the spin frequency of rotating neutron stars. We describe and implement an N-body method for simulating the motion of up to 5000 vortices in two dimensions and present the results of numerical experiments validating the method, including stability of a vortex ring and dissipative formation of an Abrikosov array. Vortex avalanches occur routinely in the simulations, when chains of unpinning events are trigge..
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Grants
Awarded by Australian Research Council (ARC) through the Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav)
Awarded by ARC
Awarded by National Science Centre, Poland
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank the referee, Andreas Reisenegger, for a careful reading of this paper and suggesting valuable improvements. GH and AM acknowledge support from the the Australian Research Council (ARC) through the Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) (grant number CE170100004) and an ARC Discovery Project (grant number DP170103625). BH acknowledges support from the National Science Centre, Poland, via grantSONATA BIS 2015/18/E/ST9/00577. GH acknowledges support from the University of Melbourne through aMelbourne Research Scholarship and a Faculty of Science Travelling Scholarship. Simulations in this paper were run on the Spartan HPC system at the University of Melbourne (Meade et al. 2017).