It has been suggested that anisotropic quasiparticle scattering will stabilize anisotropic phases of superfluid $^3$He contained within highly porous silica aerogel. For example, global anisotropy introduced via uniaxial compression of aerogel might stabilize the axial state, which is called the A-phase in bulk superfluid 3He. Here we present measurements of the phase diagram of superfluid 3He in a 98% porous silica aerogel using transverse acoustic impedance methods. We show that uniaxial compression of the aerogel by 17% does not stabilize an axial phase.
Role of inhomogeneous perturbations of nematic aerogel on the form of the order parameter emerging at the transition of liquid $^3$He in the superfluid state is considered. It is shown that a region of stability of the polar distorted ABM phase can begin right from the transition temperature. The symmetry argument is given, which selects the most favorable aerogel for stabilization of pure polar phase.
The critical field for superfluid $^3$He in axially compressed, anisotropic silica aerogel is shown to be the result of an anisotropic distribution of magnetic impurities affecting the superfluid $A$ phase. The critical field results from the fact that the $A$ phase is suppressed relative to the $B$ phase which is immune to the effects of magnetic impurities. In the absence of magnetic quasiparticle scattering in anisotropic aerogel, we find that the relative symmetry of $A$ and $B$ phase order parameters is the same as in isotropic aerogel, just as it is in pure superfluid $^3$He. These resul…
Liquid $^3$He confined in low-density, highly porous random solids such as silica aerogel provides tuneable systems to study the effects of disorder and confinement on the properties of a quantum liquid. New superfluid phases result from the interplay between disorder, confinement and complex symmetry-breaking. An extended bibliography is appended. An edited and abbreviated version of this article appeared in Physics Today 71, 11, 30 (2018).
In a p-wave Fermi superfluid suffering from the nonmagnetic impurity scatterings, a coefficient of a gradient term becomes divergent upon cooling. Consequences of this divergent rigidity in the stable vortices in the B phase in globally isotropic aerogel are considered where the "impurity scattering" events are brought by the aerogel structure. For a moderately strong "impurity scatterings", the superfluid transition line T_c(P) has a quantum critical point at a low but finite pressure. We find that, with decreasing T_c via the lowering of the pressure, the distance between the half cores comp…
In the novel superfluid polar phase realized in liquid 3He in highly anisotropic aerogels, a quantum transition to the polar-distorted A (PdA) phase may occur at a low but finite pressure Pc(0). It is shown that a nontrivial quantum dynamics of the critical fluctuation of the PdA order is induced by the presence of both the columnar-like impurity scattering leading to the Anderson's Theorem for the polar phase and the line node of the quasiparticle gap in the state, and that, in contrast to the situation of the normal to the B phase transition in isotropic aerogels, a weakly divergent behavior…
Recently, one analog of the Anderson's Theorem for the $s$-wave superconductor has attracted much interest in the context of the $p$-wave polar pairing state of superfluid $^3$He in a model aerogel in the limit of strong uniaxial anisotropy. We discuss to what extent the theorem is satisfied in the polar phase in real aerogels by examining the normal to polar transition temperature $T_c$ and the low temperature behavior of the superfluid energy gap under an anisotropy of a moderate strength and comparing the obtained results with experimental data. The situation in which the Anderson's theorem…
We present results of high magnetic field experiments in pure $^3$He (in the absence of $^4$He coverage) in nematic aerogel. In this case the aerogel strands are covered with few atomic layers of solid paramagnetic $^3$He, which enables the spin-exchange mechanism for $^3$He quasiparticles scattering. Our earlier NMR experiments showed that in low fields, instead of the polar phase, the A phase is expected to emerge in nematic aerogel. We use a vibrating wire resonator with the sample of aerogel attached to it and measure temperature dependencies of resonance properties of the resonator at dif…
We report results of experiments with liquid $^3$He confined in a high porosity anisotropic nanostructure which we call planar aerogel. This aerogel consists of nanofibers (with diameters $\sim10$ nm) which are randomly oriented in the plane normal to the specific axis. We used two samples of planar aerogel prepared using different techniques. We have found that on cooling from the normal phase of $^3$He the superfluid transition in both samples occurs into an equal spin pairing superfluid phase. NMR properties of this phase qualitatively agree with the properties of the superfluid A phase in …
We report theoretical results for heat transport by quasiparticle excitations in superfluid $^3$He infused into silica aerogel engineered with uniaxial anisotropy. For this system two distinct equal spin pairing (ESP) superfluid phases have been reported based on NMR spectroscopy. Theoretical analysis predicts the first ESP state to be the chiral A phase with chiral axis aligned along the strain axis, and the lower temperature phase to be a polar-distorted chiral phase with random transverse fluctuations in the orientation of the chiral axis. We report calculations of heat transport for the hi…
NMR experiments on superfluid 3He in a nematic aerogel have shown that the stability of the half-quantum vortex (HQV) realized in the polar phase depends on the relative direction between the magnetic field and the anisotropy axis brought by the aerogel. The vortex energy in the polar phase is examined in terms of the Ginzburg-Landau free energy incorporating the dipole energy, and the reason why the HQV in the polar phase in nematic aerogels became unstable in a transverse magnetic field upon a field-cooling is explained.
Motivated by the recent observation and argument on a large half-quantum vortex (HQV) pair connencted by a Kibble wall in superfluid 3He in nematic aerogels, we numerically study to what extent a huge HQV pair can intrinsically occur with no pinning effect due to the aerogel structure in the polar-distorted B (PdB) phase of superfluid 3He. By fully examining the impurity-scattering induced pairing vertex, the emergence of Anderson's Theorem in the p-wave superfluid is verified in the two opposite limits, the isotropic and strongly anisotropic limits. Solving numerically the resulting Ginzburg-…
