Pulsar Glitch: Superfluid Vortex Unpinning

A pulsar's crust is spun down by magnetic braking, but the quantized superfluid vortices threading its interior are pinned to the crustal lattice and cannot keep pace — a rotational lag between crust and superfluid quietly builds, storing angular momentum. This simulation renders that interior directly in 3D: hundreds of pinned vortex lines corotating with a rotating crustal lattice, and a superfluid core drifting ahead of it as the lag grows. Push the lag past a critical threshold — either automatically or by hand — and the vortices unpin in a catastrophic avalanche, conserving angular momentum as they dump it into the crust and suddenly spin the star up, exactly as observed in real pulsar glitches. Adjust the braking rate, pinning strength and avalanche size to see how glitch frequency and magnitude respond, tracked live via the crust's spin frequency, the lag fraction, and each glitch's fractional frequency jump Δν/ν.