2006/07/17 by M. Jahan-Miri, Mohsen Jahanmiri · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Quantum, superfluid, helium dynamics #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1086/506898
published as Astrophys.J.650:326-331,2006 · to appear in ApJ (vol. 649 ?)
arxiv created 2006/07/17 · openalex publication_date 2006/10/10 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
The spinning down (or 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.