Speaker
Description
Vortex avalanches are believed to cause pulsar glitches, with $10^{17}$ of quantum vortices transferring angular momentum from the inner-crust superfluid to the crust of a pulsar. In this presentation, we investigate the vortex avalanches using the Gross-Pitaevskii model for a system with more than $600$ vortices in a linearly spin-down superfluid. For the first time, we showed that during vortex avalanches, up to $\approx40$ vortices can be collectively involved in a glitch, followed by a post-avalanche dynamics that vortices redistribute with orbiting motions around large vortex density voids. In order to scale up the system size and number of vortices, we then adapt the point-vortex model to simulate the vortex-dominated system and found an effective range of parameters that can reproduce similar dynamics and comparable statistics to the quantitative level. Lastly, we discuss the possibility of generating much larger avalanches.