Friday, 16 May 2014
4.10pm
Erskine 031

Anuj J Misra (School of Mathematics & Statistics, University of Canterbury)

Title: Holographic Vortex Dynamics of Pulsars

Abstract
I aim to review the progress in understanding the underlining physics of pulsar glitches: beginning from the pedagogical development of the subject to eventually motivating the use of AdS/CFT techniques in studying a certain class of condensed matter systems.  The foundation of this work is built upon the Gross Pitaevskii (GP) model of superfluidity applied to the interior matter of neutron stars, where the condensate wave function acts as the order parameter of the macroscopic coherence theory. The excitation modes of the field equations are found to be solitonic vortices, which then go on to present a theoretical basis to the plausible theories of pulsar glitches involving vortex dynamics.  A novel approach in using the idea of AdS/CFT in the study of strongly-coupled condensed matter systems, with special attention to the models of holographic superfluidity that admit vortex-like solutions forms a new way of looking at Pulsar-Glitch mechanisms. The basic identification of the characteristic free energy configuration of global vortices in the AdS/CFT prescription enables to motivate its use in studying the pulsar glitch mechanism.