Related papers: Observation of metastable hcp solid helium
A torsional oscillator study of solid para-hydrogen has been carried out down to 20 mK in search for evidence of superfluidity. This work was inspired by the observation of the supersolid phase in solid He-4. We found evidence of a possible…
The critical-velocity behavior of oscillatory superfluid Helium-4 flow through a 2-micrometer by 2-micrometer aperture in a 0.1-micrometer-thick foil has been studied from 0.36 K to 2.10 K at frequencies from less than 50 Hz up to above…
By employing first-principles metadynamics simulations, we explore the 300 K structures of solid hydrogen over the pressure range 150-300 GPa. At 200 GPa, we find the ambient-pressure disordered hexagonal close-packed (hcp) phase transited…
We analyzed absorption features arising from interstellar neutral carbon that appeared in the UV spectra of 89 stars recorded in the highest resolution echelle modes of STIS on HST so that we could determine the relative populations of…
We study the sedimentation of colloidal gels by using a combination of light scattering, polarimetry and video imaging. The asymptotic concentration profiles $\varphi(z,t\rightarrow \infty)$ exhibit remarkable scaling properties: profiles…
Fundamental solid state physics phenomena typically occur at very low temperatures, requiring liquid helium cooling in experimental studies. Transmission electron microscopy is a well-established characterization method, which allows…
We have studied solid hydrogen under pressure at low temperatures. With increasing pressure we observe changes in the sample, going from transparent, to black, to a reflective metal, the latter studied at a pressure of 495 GPa. We have…
The small angle neutron scattering from liquid helium at saturated vapour pressure in the temperature range from 1.5 to 4.2 K was measured with the instrument D22 of the ILL Grenoble at a wavelength of 4.6 angstrom. The zero angle cross…
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…
We report studies of the growth of solid hcp \4he at pressures higher than the bulk freezing pressure using a cell design that allows us to inject atoms into the solid. Near the melting curve during injection we observe random events during…
It is generally assumed that solid hydrogen will transform into a metallic alkali-like crystal at sufficiently high pressure. However, some theoretical models have also suggested that compressed hydrogen may form an unusual two-component…
We show that, at high densities, fully variational solutions of solid-like type can be obtained from a density functional formalism originally designed for liquid 4He. Motivated by this finding, we propose an extension of the method that…
We investigate the operation of the chemothermal instability in primordial star-forming clouds with a suite of three-dimensional, moving-mesh simulations. In line with previous studies, we find that the gas at the centre of high-redshift…
We investigate the binary phase diagram of helium and iron using first-principles calculations. We find that helium, which is a noble gas and inert at ambient conditions, forms stable crystalline compounds with iron at terapascal pressures.…
We develop a theory in order to describe the effect of relaxation in a condensed medium upon the quantum decay of a metastable liquid near the spinodal at low temperatures. We find that both the regime and the rate of quantum nucleation…
Uranium is considered as a very important nuclear energy material because of the huge amount of energy released. As the main products of spontaneous decay of uranium, helium is difficult to react with uranium for its chemical inertness.…
We study the elasticity of perfect 4He at zero-temperature using the diffusion Monte Carlo method and a realistic semi-empirical pairwise potential to describe the He-He interactions. Specifically, we calculate the value of the elastic…
The classical integral cross sections of large superfluid 4He_N droplets and the number of atoms in the droplets (N=10^3-10^4) have been measured in molecular beam scattering experiments. These measurements are found to be in good agreement…
We present neutron scattering measurements of the dynamic structure factor, $S(Q,\omega)$, of amorphous solid helium confined in 47 $\AA$ pore diameter MCM-41 at pressure 48.6 bar. At low temperature, $T$ = 0.05 K, we observe $S(Q,\omega)$…
We analyze the analog of the Rayleigh instability in the field of gravity for the superfluid-crystal 4He interface provided that the heavier 4He crystal phase occupies the half-space over the lighter superfluid phase. The conditions and the…