Chiral superfluid helium-3 in the quasi-two-dimensional limit
Petri J. Heikkinen, Lev V. Levitin, Xavier Rojas, Angadjit Singh, Nathan Eng, Andrew Casey, John Saunders, Anton Vorontsov, Nikolay Zhelev, Abhilash Thanniyil S… 展开作者
Petri J. Heikkinen, Lev V. Levitin, Xavier Rojas, Angadjit Singh, Nathan Eng, Andrew Casey, John Saunders, Anton Vorontsov, Nikolay Zhelev, Abhilash Thanniyil Sebastian, Jeevak M. Parpia
Anisotropic pair breaking close to surfaces favors the chiral A phase of the superfluid $^3$He over the time-reversal invariant B phase. Confining the superfluid $^3$He into a cavity of height $D$ of the order of the Cooper pair size characterized by the coherence length $ξ_0$ - ranging between 16 nm (34 bar) and 77 nm (0 bar) - extends the surface effects over the whole sample volume, thus allowing stabilization of the A phase at pressures $P$ and temperatures $T$ where otherwise the B phase would be stable. In this Letter, the surfaces of such a confined sample are covered with a superfluid $^4$He film to create specular quasiparticle scattering boundary conditions, preventing the suppression of the superfluid order parameter. We show that the chiral A phase is the stable superfluid phase under strong confinement over the full $P$-$T$ phase diagram down to a quasi-two-dimensional limit $D / ξ_0 = 1$ , where $D = 80$ nm. The planar phase, which is degenerate with the chiral A phase in the weak-coupling limit, is not observed. The gap inferred from measurements over the wide pressure range from 0.2 to 21.0 bar leads to an empirical ansatz for temperature-dependent strong-coupling effects. We discuss how these results pave the way for the realization of the fully gapped two-dimensional $p_x + ip_y$ superfluid under more extreme confinement.
This is the manuscript version of the Physics ViewPoint article introducing the paper "Observation of half-quantum vortices in topological superfluid $^3$He", by S. Autti et al., which appeared in Physical Review Letters, December 14, 2016.
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