The A-B transition in superfluid 3He under confinement in a thin slab geometry

Abstract

The influence of confinement on the topological phases of superfluid 3He is studied using the torsional pendulum method. We focus on the phase transition between the chiral A-phase and the time-reversal-invariant B-phase, motivated by the prediction of a spatiallymodulated (stripe) phase at the A-B phase boundary. We confine superfluid 3He to a single 1.08 μm thick nanofluidic cavity incorporated into a high-precision torsion pendulum, and map the phase diagram between 0.1 and 5.6 bar. We observe only small supercooling of the A-phase, in comparison to bulk or when confined in aerogel. This has a non-monotonic pressure dependence, suggesting that a new intrinsic B-phase nucleation mechanism operates under confinement, mediated by the putative stripe phase. Both the phase diagram and the relative superfluid fraction of the A and B phases, show that strong coupling is present at all pressures, with implications for the stability of the stripe phase.

arXiv comment6 figures, 1 table + supplemental information

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Cited by in corpus (24)

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• Evidence for a Spatially-Modulated Superfluid Phase of ${}^3$He under Confinement
• Realizing Quantum Materials with Helium: Helium films at ultralow temperatures, from strongly correlated atomically layered films to topological superfluidity
• Stabilized Pair Density Wave via Nanoscale Confinement of Superfluid ${}^3$He
• Boundary central charge from bulk odd viscosity - chiral superfluids
• Fabrication of micro fluidic cavities using Si-to-glass anodic bonding
• Andreev Bound States in Superconducting Films and Confined Superfluid He-3
• Stability of Half-Quantum Vortices in Equal-Spin Pairing States of ${}^3$He
• Supercooling of the A phase of ${}^3$He
• Triangular pair density wave in confined superfluid ${}^3$He
• Thermal transport of helium-3 in a strongly confining channel
• Path-Dependent Supercooling of the ${}^3$He Superfluid A-B transition
• A-B transition in superfluid ${}^3$He and cosmological phase transitions
• Weyl Fermions and Broken Symmetry Phases of Laterally Confined ${}^3$He Films
• Vortex-bound solitons in topological superfluid ${}^3$He
• Superfluid Optomechanics with Phononic Nanostructures
• Transport of bound quasiparticle states in a two-dimensional boundary superfluid
• Surface State Dissipation in Confined 3He-A
• Strong-coupling corrections to hard domain walls in superfluid 3He-B
• Superfluid phase transition of nanoscale-confined helium-3
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• Geometric and computational aspects of chiral topological quantum matter