English

Strong orientational effect of stretched aerogel on the 3He order parameter

Soft Condensed Matter 2009-11-13 v3 Disordered Systems and Neural Networks Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems

Abstract

Deformation of aerogel strongly modifies the orientation of the order parameter of superfluid 3He confined in aerogel. We used a radial squeezing of aerogel to keep the orbital angular momentum of the 3He Cooper pairs in the plane perpendicular to the magnetic field. We did not find strong evidence for a "polar" phase, with a nodal line along the equator of the Fermi surface, predicted to occur at large radial squeezing. Instead we observed 3He-A with a clear experimental evidence of the destruction of the long-range order by random anisotropy -- the Larkin-Imry-Ma effect. In 3He-B we observed and identified new modes of NMR, which are impossible to obtain in bulk 3He-B. One of these modes is characterized by a repulsive interaction between magnons, which is suitable for the magnon Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC).

Cite

@article{arxiv.0707.3544,
  title  = {Strong orientational effect of stretched aerogel on the 3He order parameter},
  author = {J. Elbs and Yu. M. Bunkov and E. Collin and H. Godfrin and G. E. Volovik},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0707.3544},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

4 pages, 3 figures, revtex, submitted to PRL

R2 v1 2026-06-21T09:01:16.228Z