Speaker
Dr
Brynmor Haskell
(University of Melbourne)
Description
Pulsar glitches, i.e. sudden jumps in the frequency of spinning down pulsars, are thought to be the direct manifestation of a superfluid component in the pulsar interior. The exact mechanisms that gives rise to these phenomena has, however, remained a mystery for over 40 years.
The wealth of data that is now available suggests that glitches may be the consequence of the superfluid being in a self-organised-critical state and releasing angular momentum via discrete vortex avalanches, that give rise to the observed glitch.
This expectation has been borne out by quantum mechanical simulations of pinned vortices in a spinning down container, but doubts remain as to the applicability of these results to a neutron star, given that simulations cannot probe the realistic regime in which vortices are very far apart and separated by up to 10^10 pinning sites.
In this talk I will study the problem of how far a vortex can travel in a realistic neutron star crust, and whether vortex-vortex interactions are possible. I will show that there is a large region of parameter space in which vortex avalanches are possible and I will review some of the results from quantum mechanical simulations being carried out in Melbourne.
Primary author
Dr
Brynmor Haskell
(University of Melbourne)
