New Chiral Phases of Superfluid 3He Stabilized by Anisotropic Silica Aerogel
arXiv:1201.3138 · doi:10.1038/nphys2220
Abstract
A rich variety of Fermi systems condense by forming bound pairs, including high temperature [1] and heavy fermion [2] superconductors, Sr2RuO4 [3], cold atomic gases [4], and superfluid 3He [5]. Some of these form exotic quantum states having non-zero orbital angular momentum. We have discovered, in the case of 3He, that anisotropic disorder, engineered from highly porous silica aerogel, stabilizes a chiral superfluid state that otherwise would not exist. Additionally, we find that the chiral axis of this state can be uniquely oriented with the application of a magnetic field perpendicular to the aerogel anisotropy axis. At suffciently low temperature we observe a sharp transition from a uniformly oriented chiral state to a disordered structure consistent with locally ordered domains, contrary to expectations for a superfluid glass phase [6].
6 pages, 4 figure, and Supplementary Information
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Cited by in corpus (26)
- Symmetry Protected Topological Superfluids and Superconductors --- From the Basics to He ---
- Neutron Stars in the Laboratory
- Weyl semimetals and superconductors designed in an orbital selective superlattice
- The Superfluid Glass Phase of 3He-A
- Superfluid phases of He in nano-scale channels
- Chiral superfluid states in hybrid graphene heterostructures
- Superfluid 3He in Aerogel
- Stability of superfluid 3He-B in compressed aerogel
- Anisotropic phases of superfluid 3He in compressed aerogel
- Anisotropic Strong Coupling Effects on Superfluid 3He in Aerogels - Conventional Spin-Fluctuation Approach -
- Half-Quantum Vortices in Superfluid Helium
- The Effect of Magnetic Impurities on Superfluid He in Aerogel
- Path-Dependent Supercooling of the He Superfluid A-B transition
- Thermal transport of helium-3 in a strongly confining channel
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- Orientation of the Angular Momentum in Superfluid 3He-A in a Stretched Aerogel
- NMR Frequency Shifts and Phase Identification in Superfluid He
- Strong-coupling corrections to hard domain walls in superfluid 3He-B
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- Anomalous Thermal Hall Effect in Chiral Phases of He-Aerogel
- Disorder Induced Anomalous Thermal Hall Effect in Chiral Phases of Superfluid He
- Orbital-Flop Transition of Angular Momentum in a Topological Superfluid
- The Future of the Correlated Electron Problem
- Anomalous Hall Effects in Chiral Superconductors