Models of Pulsar Glitches

TL;DR

This paper reviews various models explaining pulsar glitches, sudden spin-up events in neutron stars, highlighting recent advances in understanding their origins and the internal dynamics of neutron stars.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of existing glitch models and discusses recent observational and theoretical progress in understanding neutron star interior dynamics.

Findings

Advances in observational data have improved understanding of glitch mechanisms.

Theoretical models suggest superfluid components are key to glitches.

Current models are consistent with recent pulsar observations.

Abstract

Radio pulsars provide us with some of the most stable clocks in the universe. Nevertheless several pulsars exhibit sudden spin-up events, known as glitches. More than forty years after their first discovery, the exact origin of these phenomena is still open to debate. It is generally thought that they an observational manifestation of a superfluid component in the stellar interior and provide an insight into the dynamics of matter at extreme densities. In recent years there have been several advances on both the theoretical and observational side, that have provided significant steps forward in our understanding of neutron star interior dynamics and possible glitch mechanisms. In this article we review the main glitch models that have been proposed and discuss our understanding, in the light of current observations.