T. Heikkilä, R. Hänninen, N. Kopnin, J. Kopu, T. Ojanen, J. Viljas, and G. Volovik
Visitors: D. Abanine, A. Andreev, Yu. Barash, A. Mel'nikov, E. Sonin, E. Thuneberg, and A. Zyuzin
The theoretical research is closely related to the experimental work done at the Low Temperature Laboratory. The main objects of the study are quantized vortices formed when the superfluid phases of 3He at temperatures below 3 mK are put into rotation. The structure, nucleation, and dynamics of the vortices and their interaction with other objects like surfaces, solitons, and the interface between two superfluid phases are under investigation. In addition connections of 3He physics to other branches of physics, for example, classical turbulence, instability of interfaces, cosmology, black-hole horizon, quantum vacuum of relativistic quantum fields, etc are studied.
The theoretical research in the NANO and PICO groups is closely related to their experimental activities on the quantum-mechanical phenomena in tiny Josephson junctions and on nonequilibrium effects in normal-superconducting heterostructures. Under special scrutiny are the superconductor-insulator transition in small superconducting junctions and the effect of a nonlinear environment on the superconducting phenomena. These topics are also relevant for quantum computing. Related research is carried out on the statistics of current fluctuations in the measurements of quantum-mechanical phenomena. In the normal-superconducting structures we concentrate on studying the nonequilibrium energy distributions of electrons and its effect on the so-called supercurrent transistor.