Figure 1
Inner structures of NSs. (a) The conventioanl picture: Pinned vortices in the s-wave superfluid in the core surrounded by the crust (dark blue) in the outermost region. Vortices form a lattice and are pinned at nuclei in the crust (see the inset). The orange arrows denote that vortices are released when a NS decreases its rotation speed. (b) Our picture: vortex network in the p-wave inner core (pink) surrounded by the s-wave outer core of the spherical shell (grey). Vortices are not pinned at nuclei in the crust. A single integer quantum vortex (IQV) in the s-wave outer core is split into two half-quantized vortices (HQVs) in the p-wave inner core. The red and blue vortices indicate different topological charges of the HQVs (±), respectively. There are two cases (i) and (ii) for the connections between IQVs and HQVs. (i) The same pair of two HQVs in the p-wave inner core are connected to a single IQV in the upper and lower s-wave regions, forming a cluster of a certain minimum size. (ii) Two HQVs connected to a single vortex in the upper (lower) s-wave region are connected to different IQVs in the lower (upper) s-wave region, forming a cluster with a larger size. In our proposal, this network in (ii) plays an essential role (see the text).
