Related papers: Local stress and superfluid properties of solid He…
For nearly half a century the supersolid phase of matter has remained mysterious, not only eluding experimental observation, but also generating a great deal of controversy among theorists. Recent discovery of what is interpreted as a…
The possibility of a supersolid state of matter, i.e., a crystalline solid exhibiting superfluid properties, first appeared in theoretical studies about forty years ago. After a long period of little interest due to the lack of experimental…
In recent years, experimental data were published which point to the possibility of the existence of superfluidity in solid helium. To investigate this phenomenon theoretically we employ a hierarchy of equations for reduced density matrices…
Supersolidity -- a quantum-mechanical phenomenon characterized by the presence of both superfluidity and crystalline order -- was initially envisioned in the context of bulk solid helium, as a possible answer to the question of whether a…
The ongoing experimental and theoretical effort aimed at understanding non-classical rotational inertia in solid helium, has sparked renewed interest in the supersolid phase of matter, its microscopic origin and character, and its…
When submitted to large stresses at high temperature, usual crystals may irreversibly deform. This phenomenon is known as plasticity and it is due to the motion of crystal defects such as dislocations. We have discovered that, in the…
The motion of helium crystals has been experimentally studied when the crystals fall in the superfluid liquid owing to gravity at temperatures above the roughening transitions where the whole crystal surface is in the atomically rough…
We briefly discuss theoretical and experimental discoveries in the field of supertransport and plasticity in imperfect solid \he4 and argue that these promise new exciting developments. Several experiments aimed at clarifying the origin of…
By large-scale quantum Monte Carlo simulations we show that grain boundaries in Helium-4 crystals are generically superfluid at low temperature, with a transition temperature of the order of ~0.5K at the melting pressure; insulating grain…
We have produced and observed metastable solid helium-4 below its melting pressure between 1.1 K and 1.4 K. This is achieved by an intense pressure wave carefully focused inside a crystal of known orientation. An accurate density map of the…
A frozen, solid helium core, dubbed snowball, is typically observed around cations in liquid helium. Here we discover, using path integral simulations, that around a cationic molecular impurity, protonated methane, the $^4$He atoms are…
We derive the hydrodynamic equations of motion of solid and supersolid 4He, that describe the collective modes of these phases. In particular, the usual hydrodynamics is modified in such a way that it leads to the presence of a propagating…
Although solid helium-4 (4He) may be a supersolid it also exhibits many phenomena unexpected in that context. We studied relaxation dynamics in the resonance frequency f(T) and dissipation D(T) of a torsional oscillator containing solid…
The properties of liquid helium have always been a fascinating subject to scientists. The phonon theory of liquids taking into account liquid non-static shear rigidity is employed here for studying internal energy and heat capacity of…
A supersolid is a counter-intuitive state of matter that combines the frictionless flow of a superfluid with the crystal-like periodic density modulation of a solid. Since the first prediction in the 1950s, experimental efforts to realize…
In their Letter, Haziot et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 110 (2013) 035301] report a novel phenomenon of giant plasticity for hcp Helium-4 quantum crystals. They assert that Helium-4 exhibits mechanical properties not found in classical plasticity…
We report torsional oscillator supersolid studies of highly disordered samples of solid $^4$He. In an attempt to approach the amorphous or glassy state of the solid, we prepare our samples by rapid freezing from the normal phase of liquid…
We construct a model of non-uniform condensate having a spatially modulated complex order parameter that makes it kinematically an x-ray solid, i.e., a real mass density wave, but one admitting an associated superfluid flow. Intrinsic to…
We investigate the constraints on the superfluid fraction of an amorphous solid following from an upper bound derived by Leggett. In order to accomplish this, we use as input density profiles generated for amorphous solids in a variety of…
The supersolid state of matter, exhibiting non-dissipative flow in solids, has been elusive for thirty five years. The recent discovery of a non-classical moment of inertia in solid 4He by Kim and Chan provided the first experimental…