Resonant Tunneling in Superfluid Helium-3

Abstract

The $A$ phase and the $B$ phase of superfluid He-3 are well studied, both theoretically and experimentally. The decay time scale of the $A$ phase to the $B$ phase of a typical supercooled superfluid ${}^3$He-A sample is calculated to be $10^{20,000}$ years or longer, yet the actual first-order phase transition of supercooled $A$ phase happens very rapidly (in seconds to minutes) in the laboratory. We propose that this very fast phase transition puzzle can be explained by the resonant tunneling effect in field theory, which generically happens since the degeneracies of both the $A$ and the $B$ phases are lifted by many small interaction effects. This explanation predicts the existence of peaks in the $A\to B$ transition rate for certain values of the temperature, pressure, and magnetic field. Away from these peaks, the transition simply will not happen.

28 pages, 12 figures, matches published version, improved discussion of alternative explanations, references added

References in corpus (5)

• Flux Compactification
• Eternal inflation and its implications
• A New View of the Cosmic Landscape
• Resonant Tunneling in Scalar Quantum Field Theory
• A Renormalization Group Approach to the Cosmological Constant Problem

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• The A-B transition in superfluid 3He under confinement in a thin slab geometry
• Multi-field open inflation model and multi-field dynamics in tunneling
• Baryon Number Violating Scatterings in Laboratories
• A nonperturbative test of nucleation calculations for strong phase transitions
• Supercooling of the A phase of ${}^3$He
• Path-Dependent Supercooling of the ${}^3$He Superfluid A-B transition
• A-B transition in superfluid ${}^3$He and cosmological phase transitions
• Classical Transitions in Superfluid Helium 3
• Nanofluidic platform for studying the first-order phase transitions in superfluid helium-3
• Matrix model criticality and resonant tunneling