Visualization of Bubble Nucleation in Boiling 3He

The heat transfer properties of ³He bubbles in the nucleate boiling state have been investigated in liquid ³He below 1.0 K by using the shadowgraph method. The temperature difference between the copper surface and liquid ³He temperature was also measured as a function of heat flux in steady state. The size and number of bubbles departing from the surface in a specific time were compared using photograph recorded by a high-speed video camera at various heat flux and liquid ³He temperature of 0.5, 0.7 and 1.0 K.     

Visual Observation of a Sound-Induced Bubble in Liquid 3He–4He Mixtures

We report visual observation of a sound-induced bubble in superfluid ³He–⁴He liquid mixtures using a high-speed camera at a rate of 1 msec/frame. The experiments were performed in the ³He dilute phase of phase-separated mixtures at 300 mK. The resonant frequency of the piezoelectric transducer was 9.36 MHz and the diameter of the active electrode was about 4 mm. When an acoustic wave pulse of sufficient magnitude was applied to the dilute phase from the transducer under saturated vapor pressure, a single bubble was nucleated on the active area. The bubble expanded almost spherically on the transducer, as it reached maximum size, it started shrinking, detached from the transducer, and collapsed. We also investigated the motion of the bubble in mixtures with a ³He concentration of 25% at 750 mK. In this case, the bubble grew elliptically on the transducer and detached from it without much change in shape.     

Structure of negative ion in normal liquid 3He

We present a microscopic calculation of the electron-bubble radius and energy in liquid ³He at zero applied pressure. The two-particle distribution function is approximated as input by the radial distribution function of bulk ³He. The theoretical value of the radius at 14 is about 30% below the experimental value obtained from mobility measurements. The model presented here predicts an electron-bubble surface that is less sharp compared to what was obtained by Shih and Woo for the bubble in ⁴He. Around the bubble the matter density profile appears to be characterized by a high-density region which is about one atomic layer in thickness. The density peak at the bubble surface exceeds the bulk density by about 10%. The approximation schemes are discussed and the source of discrepancy with experiment speculated upon.Work supported in part by the National Science Foundation through grant No. DMR 76-18375.     

Dynamics of Laser Ablation in Superfluid $$^4\hbox {He}$$

Pulsed laser ablation of metal targets immersed in superfluid \(^4\hbox {He}\) is visualized by time-resolved shadowgraph photography and the products are analyzed by post-experiment atomic force microscopy (AFM) measurements. The expansion dynamics of the gaseous ablation half-bubble on the target surface appears underdamped and follows the predicted behavior for the thermally induced bubble growth mechanism. An inherent instability of the ablation bubble appears near its maximum radius and no tightly focused cavity collapse or rebound events are observed. During the ablation bubble retreat phase, the presence of sharp edges in the target introduces flow patterns that lead to the creation of large classical vortex rings. Furthermore, on the nanometer scale, AFM data reveal that the metal nanoparticles created by laser ablation are trapped in spherical vortex tangles and quantized vortex rings present in the non-equilibrium liquid.     

Pool Boiling with Non-condensable Gas in Microgravity: Results of a Sounding Rocket Experiment

Pool boiling experiments in microgravity have been performed in the Sounding Rocket Maser 11. A heated plate of 1cm ² was located at the bottom of a small cylindrical tank partly filled with a refrigerant Novec HFE7000 pressurized with Nitrogen. Experiments were performed at different reservoir pressures and wall heat fluxes. The wall heat flux and wall temperature were simultaneously measured during the experiment and the behavior of the bubbles on the heater was filmed with a video camera through the transparent wall of the reservoir. The presence of Nitrogen dissolved inside the liquid led to a strong Marangoni convection around the bubble. The effect of Marangoni convection and evaporation on the wall heat transfer is analyzed in function of the relative values of the wall temperature and saturation temperature.     

Dynamic Motion of Superfluid Bubble in Solid 4He

We have observed an interesting motion of a superfluid bubble in solid ⁴ He with the solid/liquid interface through the video camera. The host hcp crystal was formed at around 0.8 K with c-axis oriented approximately 45 degrees from the horizontal solid/liquid interface. When a fairly strong power of 10 MHz pulsed sound was applied to a transducer in the solid, a small rounded liquid droplet was nucleated at one spot on the transducer. The droplet became larger as the sound pulse continued to be applied, developing over the entire transducer, and finally began to grow upwards. As it increased in size, the c-facet was observed in the bubble. At this time the shape of the bubble became something like a pyramid. When a top of the pyramidal shape of the bubble touched the interface, it changed its shape drastically, rapidly merged into the superfluid phase. The detailed motion was determined by careful observation of the video records. When the bubble size became pretty large, the horizontal interface moved upward to compensate the lower density of the bubble in order that total number of atoms in the cell should be retained.     

Optical interferometry at ultra low temperatures

We have developed optical, interferometric methods for investigations of interfaces at ultra low temperatures. In our scheme conventional optical windows are avoided: laser illumination (He-Ne) is guided into the cryostat via a single-mode optical fiber and images are taken using a CCD sensor mounted inside the 4-K vacuum can. A real-time video camera has been successfully used in investigations of superfluid³He down to 0.6 mK whereas a slow-scan camera has been employed for optimal contrast in low-intensity imaging of liquid/solid interfaces (reflection coefficient 10^–6). The investigated topics include (1) superfluid³He surface in rotation and during rapid deceleration, (2) hydrodynamics of thin superfluid³He layers, (3) superfluid/solid interface in⁴He, and (4) wetting of superfluid⁴He by normal³He in phase separated mixtures. A vertical resolution of 10 nm and even below has been achieved in these studies.     

Heat Capacity of Adsorbed Helium-3 at Ultra-Low Temperatures

We report on direct measurements of the heat capacity of monolayers of ³He adsorbed on the surface of a copper cell filled with superfluid ³He. We found that at ultra low temperatures the surface ³He heat capacity dominates over the heat capacity of the bulk liquid ³He. The replacement of adsorbed ³He by ⁴He changes the heat capacity of the sample by an order of magnitude. These investigations were made in the framework of the “ULTIMA” project, a dark matter detector based on superfluid ³He in the limit of ultra low temperatures.     

Low Temperature Heat-Capacities of Liquid 3He Thin Films

We have measured the heat capacity of ³ He thin films adsorbed on graphite at an areal density of 15.0 nm ^–2 down to as low as 100 K. The second-layer ³ He behaves as a degenerate 2D Fermi fluid in the whole temperature range we studied. We observed no anomalous behavior in the heat capacity near 3 mK in contradiction to the recent report by other workers. This indicates that possible superfluid transitions would be below 100 K. Instead, a small and temperature-independent contribution to the heat capacity was observed, which we attribute to nuclear-spin degrees of freedom in glassy solid ³ He trapped in substrate heterogeneities.     

Specific Heat Anomaly in bcc Solid 3He

We have studied the origin of the excess specific heat (anomaly) above 10 mK in bcc solid ³ He near melting pressure. We applied strong magnetic fields to the sample to see whether the anomaly arises from spin polarons due to vacancies. The specific heat is the same before and after applying magnetic fields of 10-12 T. This result possibly indicates that the anomaly arises from the origin different from vacancies. Next, in order to check whether the anomaly comes from the surface magnetism, we measured the specific heat by coating the surface of sintered silver with three layers and two layers of ⁴ He. The results showed that unexpected large heat capacity due to phase separation of solid ³ He-⁴ He surpassed and smeared the original specific heat anomaly. We are investigating the origin of the anomaly further.     

Heat Capacity of Dilute 3He–4He Films on Graphite

The heat capacity of dilute ³He–⁴He films is measured to clarify whether the second adsorbed layer of ⁴He films on graphite solidify into the so-called “4/7 phase.” The ³He areal density is fixed at 0.2 nm^?2, whereas the ⁴He areal density is gradually increased. The measured heat capacities suddenly decrease with an increasing areal density approaching that of the 4/7 phase. Above the areal density of the 4/7 phase, the heat capacities do not reduce completely to zero and have finite values. The behavior of the heat capacity does not change over a rather wide areal density regime, although it suddenly increases or recovers at around the areal density of the third-layer promotion. These behaviors can be interpreted as the separation of ³He–⁴He mixture films into a ³He-rich phase and a ⁴He-rich phase, with the ³He-rich phase solidifying into the 4/7 phase and the ⁴He-rich phase remaining fluid below the areal density of the third-layer promotion. These observations strongly suggest that a ⁴He film adsorbed on a graphite surface does not solidify into the 4/7 phase.     

The decay rate of critical fluctuations in3He-4He mixtures near the gas-liquid critical point

We have measured the critical light scattering intensity and the Rayleigh line shape for³He and for³He-⁴He mixtures with compositionX(³He)=0.95, 0.79, and 0.63 along their respective critical isochores near the plait point. The experimental linewidth of³He is compared with the calculated one from heat conductivity and equation of state measurements, and satisfactory agreement is obtained. For mixtures, gravity effects in our cell of finite height prevent us from reaching the critical point along a path at strictly constant composition and density. HenceT _c cannot be determined directly. Using the prediction that the scattered light intensity in the mixtures has the same diverging behavior as for the pure fluid, we determine the reduced temperaturet[T – T _c(X)]/T _c from the intensity. The measured Rayleigh line shape can be expressed by a single decay rate as a function oft for a given scattering angle of the light beam. Our experiments show that in the mixtures is only weakly dependent on composition. Our analysis leads to the determination of the mass diffusion coefficientD, which is found to be nearly independent of composition and nearly equal to the thermal diffusivityD _T measured for³He. The results are discussed in the light of the predictions from mode coupling theory.     

Visualising superfluid turbulent counterflow

No Heading An apparatus has been constructed to make superfluid counterflow in ⁴He visible. The counterflow channel is made of glass and has rectangular cross-section of height 0.01 cm, width 2 cm and length 4 cm. One of the 2 cm × 4 cm faces is silvered to allow a laser beam passing through the other face to reflect and thus traverse the fluid layer twice. We analyse the possibility that the turbulence could be made visible on a shadowgraph image projected onto a cooled CCD sensor. The image could arise either from small perturbations in the temperature gradient driving the counterflow caused by the turbulence itself, or by dispersion of a small tracer amount of ³He injected into the normal fluid streamlines. We conclude that the tracer technique shows the greater promise because of the larger scales of the perturbation in the refractive index of the fluid caused by the introduction of the ³He. We describe our technique for injecting small volume 1 ms pulses of ³He into the channel.PACS numbers: 67.40.Vs, 47.37.+q, 67.57.De     

Evaporative Cooling of 3He-4He Mixture Films

Heat transport by saturated ³ He- ⁴ He films has been studied at temperatures 50..350 mK and the bulk concentration of ³ He ranging from 0.1 ppm to 5%. The cooling of the film, when locally heated above 160 mK, is mainly via 2D flow of surface ³ He from colder area followed by evaporation of ³ He. At certain heating power the 2D flow becomes a bottleneck, the heated spot runs out of ³ He and its temperature abruptly increases. The critical power is nearly proportional to the surface density of ³ He. For higher ³ He concentrations another distinct step in temperature has been observed at a lower heating power. It is attributed to the existence of an excited ³ He surface state whose population starts at ³ He surface density of 3.5×10 ¹⁴ cm^–2 . The second state is located about 1.2 K higher in energy than the ground state and provides an additional channel for the 2D flow of ³ He.     

Thermal convection and thermal conductivity of nondilute3He-4He mixtures

We present measurements of the critical temperature difference for the onset of thermal convection and the effective thermal conductivity in two³He-superfluid-⁴He mixtures. The mixtures were 6.8% and 9.8% by molar volume of³He in⁴He and the measurements were made from 0.65 K to just above the superfluid transition temperature for each mixture. The measurements were made as part of an effort to visualize convective flow patterns in helium mixtures using optical shadowgraph techniques. We discuss the implications of our results for this effort.     

Possible 3He Boltzmann Gas Formed on Three-Dimensional Nanopores Preplated with 4He

We have measured the heat capacity of ³He adsorbed on three-dimensionally connected nanopores, 2.7 nm in diameter, preplated with about 1.3 atomic layers of ⁴He. At low coverages of ³He, the ³He heat capacity is roughly constant at the measured temperatures between 0.1 and 1 K. Its molar heat capacity is on the order of the gas constant R, between 1.1R and 1.8R. This suggests a Boltzmann gas state of the adsorbed ³He. At high coverages, the heat capacity is likely approaching linear in T at low temperatures, which suggests a degenerate state at further lower temperatures.     

Vapor Pressure and Heat Capacity Measurement of 3He Adsorbed on 18Å-Pores

We have measured the vapor pressure (0.84 K 3 He adsorbed on pores 18 Å in diameter. The results of the vapor pressure measurement indicate that ³ He film grows up to the second layer. In the first layer, the heat capacity of ³ He shows the same temperature and coverage dependence as ⁴ He, indicating a solid phase. Above a little higher coverage than second layer promotion, heat capacity isotherms for ³ He at several hundred mK increase with coverage while those for ⁴ He decrease. This large heat capacity of ³ He is the nuclear spin heat capacity of the second layer fluid ³ He.     

Observation of3He crystal nucleation from the superfluid phases

A CCD camera operating at T = 65 K was mounted in the vacuum space of our nuclear demagnetization cryostat. This has allowed us to make observations of³He crystals at temperatures below the superfluid phase transitions, in contrast to direct optical observations, which have so far been limited to T 20 mK.1 The good thermal equilibrium provided by the superfluid allows us to nucleate single crystals of³He in the region of the cell visible to the optical system. This occurs either spontaneously (due either to gravitational pressure gradients or local surface defects) or as a result of a small applied heat pulse.     

Prediction of reentrant wetting of3He-4He mixtures on cesium

We examine the effect of ³ He impurities on the wetting behavior of⁴He on cesium, predicting a phase diagram which includes reentrant wetting transitions. This phase diagram is shown to be very sensitive to effects such as a theoretically predicted bound state of³He at the liquid-cesium interface, and the contact angle may be sensitive to interesting temperature dependences of the helium-cesium surface tension resulting from surface rotons or Rayleigh waves.     

Nonlinear Transport of Wigner Solid on Superfluid 3He–A

Electrons trapped on the surface of liquid helium form the Wigner solid accompanied with the periodic surface deformation (dimple lattice). Because of the soft surface, the Wigner solid shows unique nonlinear transport properties. Here we present the results of the nonlinear transport measurements of the Wigner solid on the superfluid ³He A phase at temperatures down to 200 μK in a magnetic field of 0.363 Tesla. The transition from linear to nonlinear behavior is observed as increasing the driving voltage. This behavior is very similar to those previously observed in the B phase and normal phase, and attributable to the deformation of the dimple shape caused by the strong damping of liquid ³He.