Description: | A very young, magnetically active neutron star will show complex spin phenomena that include strong torque variations and precession. My colleagues and I at Cornell have been investigating the requirements for explaining two key aspects of repeating fast radio bursts: the absence of any fast periodicity that could be associated with the spin of a rotating object and the identification of a slow quasiperiodicity with a 16-day period in one source. I will discuss these in terms of a precessing neutron star with a multiplicity of radio beams. Part of the discusson considers extrapolation from spin noise phenomena seen in canonical radio pulsars to hyper-magnetars. Any slow precession requires certain conditions inside the neutron star, such as the absence of pinned superfluid vortices. This work is in collaboration with I. Wasserman, G. Batra, and S. Chatterjee.
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