Gross-Pitaevskii model of pulsar glitches

Understand

The first large-scale quantum mechanical simulations of pulsar glitches are presented, using a Gross-Pitaevskii model of the crust-superfluid system in the presence of pinning.

• Power-law distributions of simulated glitch sizes are obtained, in accord with astronomical observations, with exponents ranging from -0.55 to -1.26.
• Examples of large-scale simulations, containing $\sim 200$ vortices, reveal that these statistics persist in the many-vortex limit.
• Waiting-time distributions are also constructed.