A superfluid 4He interferometer operating near 2 K

Abstract

Matter-wave interferometers reveal some of the most fascinating phenomena of the quantum world. Phase shifts due to rotation (the Sagnac effect) for neutrons, free atoms and superfluid 3He reveal the connection of matter waves to a non-rotating inertial frame. In addition, phase shifts in electron waves due to magnetic vector potentials (the Aharonov-Bohm effect) show that physical states can be modified in the absence of classical forces. We report here the observation of interference induced by the Earth's rotation in superfluid 4He at 2 K, a temperature 2000 times higher than previously achieved with 3He. This interferometer, an analog of a dc-SQUID, employs a recently reported phenomenon wherein superfluid 4He exhibits quantum oscillations in an array of sub-micron apertures. We find that the interference pattern persists not only when the aperture array current-phase relation is a sinusoidal function characteristic of the Josephson effect, but also at lower temperatures where it is linear and oscillations occur by phase slips. The modest requirements for the interferometer (2 K cryogenics and fabrication of apertures at the level of 100nm) and its potential resolution suggest that, when engineering challenges such as vibration isolation are met, superfluid 4He interferometers could become important scientific probes.

8 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Direct measurement of diurnal polar motion by ring laser gyroscopes
• Transition from phase slips to the Josephson effect in a superfluid 4He weak link
• Quantum whistling in superfluid 4He
• Thermally Driven Josephson Oscillations in Superfluid 4He

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• Threshold for creating excitations in a stirred superfluid ring
• Anderson's considerations on the flow of superfluid helium: some offshoots
• Quantitative acoustic models for superfluid circuits
• Flux locking a superfluid interferometer
• Transition from synchronous to asynchronous superfluid phase slippage in an aperture array
• On Josephson effects in insulating spin systems
• Direct measurement of quantum phase gradients in superfluid 4He flow
• Adiabatically tuning quantized supercurrents in an annular Bose-Einstein condensate
• Quasi-molecular bosonic complexes -- a pathway to atomic analog of SQUID with controlled sensitivity
• Persistent current by a static non-Hermitian ratchet