ITC Colloquium - Yuri Levin (Flatiron) in Phillips
Date and Time
November 7, 2019
11:00AM - 12:00PM EST
Location
Phillips
Magnetic coupling between the crust and the core of neutron stars. Abstract: What do magnetic fields look like inside neutron stars? We do not know; since reliable observational constraints are few, the theorists' imagination can run wild. For example, some very popular models assume that the field is confined to the crust and does not penetrate into the core at all!! In this talk I will give two insights. First comes from a spectacular magnetospheric disturbance observed recently during a glitch in Vela. I argue that the disturbance is a result of a quake, during which crustal seismic waves penetrated into the magnetosphere and the core of the pulsar. I will show evidence for a strong magnetic crust-core coupling, which points with certainty to a strong poloidal field at the crust-core interface, and indicates (with less certainty) that the magnetic stresses are strengthened by superconductivity in the core. The second insight comes from magnetar quasi-periodic oscillations. The models that included the crust-core coupling, have been predicting that many of the QPOs should be strongly transient and intermittent. Recently, these predictions have been confirmed by Miller et al.