Physical review. B, Condensed matter
Comment on ‘‘Symmetry and structure of quantized vortices in superfluid ’3
James A. Sauls, Joseph W. Serene
Abstract
Recent theoretical attempts to explain the observed vortex-core phase transition in superfluid $^{3}\mathit{B}$ yield conflicting results. Variational calculations by Fetter and Theodrakis, based on realistic strong-coupling parameters, yield a phase transition in the Ginzburg-Landau region that is in qualitative agreement with the phase diagram. Numerically precise calculations by Salomaa and Volivil (SV), based on the Brinkman-Serene-Anderson (BSA) parameters, do not yield a phase transition between axially symmetric vortices. The ambiguity of these results is in part due to the large differences between the \ensuremath{\beta} parameters, which are inputs to the vortex free-energy functional. We comment on the relative merits of the \ensuremath{\beta} parameters based on recent improvements in the quasiparticle scattering amplitude and the BSA parameters used by SV.