CONSTRAINTS ON NEUTRON STAR STRUCTURE FROM PULSAR GLITCHES

Neutron stars are among the densest objects in the Universe, making them a perfect laboratory to study nuclear matter under extreme conditions. Pulsars – rapidly rotating magnetised neutron stars – are one of their possible manifestations, being observed as an extremely regular periodic emission in the radio spectrum. This radiation is produced by converting their rotational energy and, because of this, pulsars are expected to spin down. Some of them, however, have been observed exhibiting sudden accelerations in their rotation, also known as glitches. Nowadays, pulsar glitches are interpreted as the manifestation of vortex dynamics in the internal neutron superfluid, which lags behind the observable charged component in spinning down, occasionally releasing angular momentum to it and giving rise to a glitch. In this work, we will present three different observational characteristics of a glitching pulsar – its largest glitch, its average acceleration due to glitches and its short-time evolution after a glitch – and we will try to extract information about the neutron star from each of them. In particular, we will try to set constraints on the mass of the star, the moment of inertia of its reservoir component and several other quantities tied to the glitch phenomenon, with the ultimate goal of increasing our knowledge about the properties of matter at densities above those of terrestrial nuclei.