Cavitation pressure in liquid helium

Abstract

Recent experiments have suggested that, at low enough temperature, the homogeneous nucleation of bubbles occurs in liquid helium near the calculated spinodal limit. This was done in pure superfluid helium 4 and in pure normal liquid helium 3. However, in such experiments, where the negative pressure is produced by focusing an acoustic wave in the bulk liquid, the local amplitude of the instantaneous pressure or density is not directly measurable. In this article, we present a series of measurements as a function of the static pressure in the experimental cell. They allowed us to obtain an upper bound for the cavitation pressure P_cav (at low temperature, P_cav < -2.4 bar in helium 3, P_cav < -8.0 bar in helium 4). From a more precise study of the acoustic transducer characteristics, we also obtained a lower bound (at low temperature, P_cav > -3.0 bar in helium 3, P_cav > - 10.4 bar in helium 4). In this article we thus present quantitative evidence that cavitation occurs at low temperature near the calculated spinodal limit (-3.1 bar in helium 3 and -9.5 bar in helium 4). Further information is also obtained on the comparison between the two helium isotopes. We finally discuss the magnitude of nonlinear effects in the focusing of a sound wave in liquid helium, where the pressure dependence of the compressibility is large.

11 pages, 9 figures

References in corpus (8)

• Structural and dynamical properties of superfluid helium: a density functional approach
• Progress in Monte Carlo calculations of Fermi systems: normal liquid 3He
• Monte Carlo Calculations for Liquid ${}^4$He at Negative Pressure
• Acoustic crystallization and heterogeneous nucleation
• Path integral Monte Carlo simulation of helium at negative pressures
• Quantum cavitation in liquid helium
• Thermodynamically consistent equilibrium properties of normal-liquid Helium-3
• Quantum cavitation in liquid ${}^3$He: dissipation effects

Cited by in corpus (11)

• The discovery of superfluidity
• Quantum Monte Carlo simulation of overpressurized liquid 4He
• Cavitation of Electrons Bubbles in Liquid Helium Below saturation Pressure
• Anomaly in the stability limit of liquid helium 3
• Initial stage of cavitation in liquids and its observation by Rayleigh scattering
• Towards a density functional description of liquid pH2
• Nucleation kinetics of vapor bubbles in a liquid with arbitrary viscosity
• Sub-barrier cavitation regime in liquid helium
• Sub-barrier cavitation in liquid helium
• Underbarrier nucleation kinetics in a metastable quantum liquid near the spinodal
• Cavitation on single electron bubbles in liquid helium at small negative pressure