Pulsar glitches and superfluid dynamics in neutron stars

Abstract

Glitches are sudden jumps in the spin frequency of pulsars that occur at random times and over several orders of magnitude in size. One popular theory holds that glitches are caused by differential rotation between the neutron star crust and a superfluid component in the interior. This implies that glitches can be used to study the dense nuclear matter inside neutron stars, testing a regime of physics inaccessible to present-day laboratory experiments or other electromagnetic observations. In the vortex avalanche model of pulsar glitches, the angular momentum of the superfluid is determined by the configuration of an array of quantized vortices which pin to impurities in the interior. As the..