Spin-down Rate of Pinned Superfluid

Abstract

The spinning down (up) of a superfluid is associated with a radial motion of its quantized vortices. In the presence of pinning barriers against the motion of the vortices, a spin-down may be still realized through ``random unpinning'' and ``vortex motion,'' as two physically separate processes, as suggested recently. The spin-down rate of a pinned superfluid is calculated, in this framework, by directly solving the equation of motion applicable to only the unpinned moving vortices, at any given time. The results indicate that the pinned superfluid in the crust of a neutron star may as well spin down at the same steady-state rate as the rest of the star, through random unpinning events, while pinning conditions prevail and the superfluid rotational lag is smaller than the critical lag value.

to appear in ApJ (vol. 649 ?)

References in corpus (2)

• Observational Constraints on the Role of the Crust in the Post-glitch Relaxation
• Superfluid Spin-down, with Random Unpinning of the Vortices

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Models of Pulsar Glitches
• Modelling pulsar glitches with realistic pinning forces: a hydrodynamical approach
• Superfluid vortex unpinning as a coherent noise process, and the scale invariance of pulsar glitches
• Glitch recoveries in radio-pulsars and magnetars
• Instability of Superfluid Flow in the Neutron Star Core
• Instability of Superfluid Flow in the Neutron Star Inner Crust
• Superfluid vortex-mediated mutual friction in non-homogeneous neutron star interiors
• Axially symmetric equations for differential pulsar rotation with superfluid entrainment
• Pinned vortex hopping in a neutron star crust
• The effect of superfluid hydrodynamics on pulsar glitch sizes and waiting times
• Lagrangian perturbation theory for a superfluid immersed in an elastic neutron star crust
• Rotational Coupling of the Pinned Core Superfluid