Stephanie J. Erickson (University of Southampton)
The crust of a neutron star (NS) introduces interface and crustal modes that will affect the dynamics of NS systems. In particular, starquakes could produce observed phenomena such as pulsar glitches, precursors to short-hard gamma-ray bursts, or quasi-periodic oscillations. We have developed methods to more accurately simulate starquakes, including a conservation-law formulation for non-linear elasticity to model the crust, and an extension of the ghost-fluid method to evolve the sharp crust-core interface. To demonstrate these methods, we have constructed a starquake toy model, where shattering occurs in an anisotropically stressed crust, which is coupled to a fluid core and external atmosphere in a background potential.