Post-Glitch Recovery as a Thermometer: Vortex Creep Timescales for Vela and the Crab

After a glitch, a pulsar's spin frequency does not settle immediately; it relaxes over days to months as vortices creep back through the crust. This study computes post-glitch recovery timescales from the nonlinear vortex-creep response, in which the timescale is set by the ratio of thermal energy to pinning activation energy multiplied by the lag replenishment time. For Vela, with an internal temperature of 2.0e8 K and an activation energy of 1.0 MeV, the recovery time is 81 days. For the Crab pulsar, hotter and spinning down faster, it is 14 days. Raising the activation energy to 3.0 MeV shortens Vela's recovery to 27 days, while lowering the temperature to 1.0e8 K lengthens it to 41 days. The computed range brackets the exponential components fitted to observed recoveries, which run from days to a few hundred days, without adjustable parameters beyond the stated temperature and activation energy. This study is simulated and computed from stated assumptions; it is not a measurement.