English

Hard domain walls in superfluid 3He-B

Superconductivity 2014-11-24 v2

Abstract

We study theoretically planar interfaces between two domains of superfluid 3He-B. The structure of the B-B walls is determined on the scale of the superfluid condensation energy, and thus the domain walls have thickness on the order of the Ginzburg-Landau coherence length. We study the stability and decay schemes of five inequivalent structures of such domain walls using one-dimensional Ginzburg-Landau simulation. We find that only one of the structures is stable against small perturbations. We also argue that B-B interfaces could result from adiabatic A to B transition and study textures at B-B interfaces. The B-B interface has a strong orienting effect on spin-orbit rotation producing textures similar as caused by external walls. We study the B-B interface in a parallel-plate geometry and find that the conservation of spin current sets an essential condition on the structure. The stable B-B interface gives rise to half-quantum circulation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1408.3623,
  title  = {Hard domain walls in superfluid 3He-B},
  author = {Matti Silveri and Tero Turunen and Erkki Thuneberg},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1408.3623},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

14 pages, 10 figures, updated to the published version including one more figure, discussion of excitation spectrum, more references and some clarifications

R2 v1 2026-06-22T05:30:23.263Z