Article
Polar Phase of Superfluid 3He in Anisotropic Aerogel
We report the first observation of the polar phase of superfluid 3He. This phase appears in 3He confined in a new type of aerogel with a nearly parallel arrangement of strands which play the role of ordered impurities. Our experiments qualitatively agree with theoretical predictions and suggest that in other systems with unconventional Cooper pairing (e.g., in unconventional superconductors) similar phenomena may be found in the presence of anisotropic impurities.
We report results of experiments with superfluid 3He confined in aerogels with parallel strands which lead to anisotropic scattering of 3He quasiparticles. We vary boundary conditions for the scattering by covering the strands with different numbers of atomic 4He layers and observe that the superfluid phase diagram and the nature of superfluid phases strongly depend on the coverage. We assume the main reason for these phenomena is a magnetic channel of the scattering which becomes important at low coverages and can be essential in other Fermi systems with triplet pairing.
We provide topological classification of possible phases with the symmetry of the planar phase of superfluid He3. Compared to the B phase [class DIII in classification of A. Altland and M. R. Zirnbauer, Phys. Rev. B 55, 1142 (1997)], it has an additional symmetry, which modifies the topology. We analyze the topology in terms of explicit mappings from the momentum space and also discuss explicitly topological invariants for the B phase. We further show how the bulk-boundary correspondence for the three-dimensional (3D) B phase can be inferred from that for the 2D planar phase. A general condition is derived for the existence of topologically stable zero modes at the surfaces of 3D superconductors with class-DIII symmetries.
One of the most sought-after objects in topological quantum-matter systems is a vortex carrying half a quantum of circulation. They were originally predicted to exist in superfluid 3He−A but have never been resolved there. Here we report an observation of half-quantum vortices (HQVs) in the polar phase of superfluid 3He. The vortices are created with rotation or by the Kibble-Zurek mechanism and identified based on their nuclear magnetic resonance signature. This discovery provides a pathway for studies of unpaired Majorana modes bound to the HQV cores in the polar-distorted A phase.
The dynamics of a two-component Davydov-Scott (DS) soliton with a small mismatch of the initial location or velocity of the high-frequency (HF) component was investigated within the framework of the Zakharov-type system of two coupled equations for the HF and low-frequency (LF) fields. In this system, the HF field is described by the linear Schrödinger equation with the potential generated by the LF component varying in time and space. The LF component in this system is described by the Korteweg-de Vries equation with a term of quadratic influence of the HF field on the LF field. The frequency of the DS soliton`s component oscillation was found analytically using the balance equation. The perturbed DS soliton was shown to be stable. The analytical results were confirmed by numerical simulations.
Radiation conditions are described for various space regions, radiation-induced effects in spacecraft materials and equipment components are considered and information on theoretical, computational, and experimental methods for studying radiation effects are presented. The peculiarities of radiation effects on nanostructures and some problems related to modeling and radiation testing of such structures are considered.