Hydrostatic Theory of Superfluid ³He-B

The basic property of superfluidity is the existence of mass currents that do not dissipate energy. In addition to that property, the superfluid phases of ³He also support dissipationless spin currents, i.e. spins pointing up flow in opposite direction than spins pointing down. In ³He-B the spin currents are determined by a spin-orbit rotation axis n(r), which generally depends on the location r. The purpose of the hydrostatic theory is to calculate the field n(r), also known as texture. The texture can be measured by NMR, and thus the theory can be compared to experiments. An important part of the project is to extract those parameters from experiments that cannot reliably be calculated theoretically. Knowledge of the texture is essential for understanding many phenomena: vortices, ³He in aerogel, Josephson phenomena etc.

Publications

• E.V. Thuneberg: Hydrostatic theory of superfluid ³He-B, J. Low Temp. Phys. 122, 657 (2001), cond-mat 0005074. The numerical evaluation of different parameters is discussed here.
• J. Kopu and E.V. Thuneberg: Calculation of NMR line shape in rotating superfluid ³He-B, Physica B 284, 256 (2000).
• J. Kopu, R. Schanen, R. Blaauwgeers, V.B. Eltsov, M. Krusius, J.J. Ruohio, and E.V. Thuneberg: NMR line shape of rotating ³He-B at large counterflow velocity, J. Low Temp. Phys. 120, 213 (2000), preprint.
• J. Kopu and M. Krusius: Spin-mass vortex in ³He-B: order-parameter texture and NMR signature, Phys. Rev. B 64, 94504 (2001).

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