New Molecular Dynamics Methods for Simulating Neutron Star Crusts with Superfluid Vortices

Abstract

Superfluid vortices in neutron star crusts are thought to be pinned to the lattice of nuclei in the crust. The unpinning of superfluid vortices in spin glitches therefore motivates us to study the vortex-crust interaction explicitly with molecular dynamics. In this work, we present a new molecular dynamics methods to characterize the response of the crust to a rigid vortex. When vortex pinning forces and nearest neighbor Coulomb forces are comparable, we observe a qualitatively new phenomena of lattice entrainment with implications for the elastic evolution of the crust.