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Journal of the Physical Society of Japan

Spin Polarized Superfluid3He A1

Harry Kojima, Hidehiko Ishimoto

Published Nov 10, 2008• 16 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Under applied magnetic field, the originally single superfluid 3 He transition near 3 mK in zero field splits into two transitions between which a new A 1 phase emerges. The two second order transitions are marked by abrupt changes in viscosity, zero sound attenuation and nuclear magnetic resonance. To date, the maximum magnetic field for producing A 1 phase is 15 T. The A 1 phase has been identified with a spin-polarized (ferromagnetic) superfluid system which breaks the relative symmetry between spin, orbit and gauge spaces. A superfluid mass current in A 1 is simultaneously a spin current resulting in the propagation of spin-entropy wave. Experiments with spin-entropy wave provide measurements of anisotropic superfluid density and strong coupling parameters, spin diffusion coefficient and texture transformations. Owing to the spin-polarized nature, superflows may be generated by applied magnetic field gradients and measured from the induced magnetic fountain pressure. The mechanical spin density detector is developed to measure the spin relaxation in A 1 phase. The observed unexpected temperature dependence of the spin relaxation time gives evidence that the A 1 phase contains a small amount of the predicted minority spin condensate from dipolar interaction energy.

DOI
10.1143/jpsj.77.111001

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Under applied magnetic field, the originally single superfluid 3 He transition near 3 mK in zero field splits into two transitions between which a new A 1 phase emerges. The two second order transitions are marked by abrupt changes in viscosity, zero sound attenuation and nuclear magnetic resonance. To date, the maximum magnetic field for producing A 1 phase is 15 T. The A 1 phase has been identified with a spin-polarized (ferromagnetic) superfluid system which breaks the relative symmetry between spin, orbit and gauge spaces. A superfluid mass current in A 1 is simultaneously a spin current resulting in the propagation of spin-entropy wave. Experiments with spin-entropy wave provide measurements of anisotropic superfluid density and strong coupling parameters, spin diffusion coefficient and texture transformations. Owing to the spin-polarized nature, superflows may be generated by applied magnetic field gradients and measured from the induced magnetic fountain pressure. The mechanical spin density detector is developed to measure the spin relaxation in A 1 phase. The observed unexpected temperature dependence of the spin relaxation time gives evidence that the A 1 phase contains a small amount of the predicted minority spin condensate from dipolar interaction energy.
The magnetic fountain effect occurring in superfluid 3 He A 1 phase is a unique phenomenon in which the pressure and magnetic field gradients in the chemical potential are balanced. The effect has been applied extensively to investigate the intrinsic spin relaxation. We constructed a new improved sample cell. The new cell includes an inner detector and an outer reservoir chamber made of "Macor" which was helpful to reduce the heat release possibly arising from proton nuclei under high magnetic fields. The measured temperature difference between the two chambers was cut to less than 5 μK. The measured relaxation time τ of the fountain pressure decreases monotonically and smoothly as the temperature is decreased from T c1 (normal- A 1 boundary) towards T c2 (A 1 - A 2 boundary). As the temperature approaches T c2 , τ tends to vanish smoothly.
Mechanical pumping and filtering of spin-polarized condensate were realized in the superfluid 3He A1 phase by the pneumatic pumping action of an electrostatically actuated diaphragm. Spin pumping increased the net spin polarization by 20 – 50 % as measured by the induced pressure change during spin pumping. The observed spin relaxation time was consistent with the increased spin polarization. These observations demonstrate the feasibility of using spin pumping to substantially increase the effective magnetic field to which the A1 phase is exposed.
Water flowing down a pipe experiences viscous drag that causes it to lose energy and slow down. A superfluid, such as liquid helium (3He and 4He) or electrons in a superconductor, can flow without friction when in contact with a wall. This fascinating phenomenon, or superfluidity, was discovered by Kapitza [1], Allen and Misener [2] in 1937. The formation of a superfluid is related to the formation of a Bose--Einstein condensate (BEC). 4He is a boson as its total spin is zero, an integer. Condensation in fermionic 3He liquid occurs through composite bosons of paired atoms in a process similar to electron pairing in a superconductor. To explain the peculiar properties of superfluid helium, Landau considered a superfluid to be comprised of two parts: a ‘pure’ superfluid component with zero entropy and viscosity, and a normal component that behaves like ordinary fluid. An interesting manifestation of this two-fluid model is the existence of two types of oscillations, the ‘first and second sounds’ as named by Landau. The ‘first sound’ is a wave that propagates at constant entropy per particle, just like sounds in ordinary fluids. It propagates with pressure and density oscillations. ‘Second sound’, unlike what its name suggests, is not audible as it propagates at nearly constant pressure (isobaric oscillation). Here, entropy density takes the role of pressure/density in normal sound waves. Historically, the observation of the second sound in superfluid helium, and the measurement of its speed, played a crucial role in understanding the nature of superfluid helium. The speed of the second sound can be used to determine the superfluid fraction, i.e. the ratio of the superfluid density to the total fluid density [3,4]. In the past decades, the field of ultracold atomic gases has developed into a fertile ground for studying superfluid physics, as the inter-particle interactions between two atoms can be tuned using the so-called Fano–Feshbach resonances. Systematic studies on Fermi gases can be preformed in the limit of strong interactions, whose properties are difficult to predict but important to the understanding of strongly correlated quantum systems of many particles, such as high-temperature superconductors, quark–gluon plasmas and neutron stars. Quantitative determination of the superfluid fraction in strongly interacting Fermi gases has been an elusive goal of scientists for many years, as the methods that allow the determination of the superfluid fraction in liquid helium cannot be directly applied to ultracold gases. For example, to excite the second sound in liquid helium, a local heat pulse can be created by passing a current through a heating wire submersed in the liquid. The heat pulse can then be detected at the other end of the liquid using a temperature sensitive sensor as illustrated in Fig. 1(a). Such methods cannot be implemented with ultracold atomic gas ensembles that typically contain only about hundreds of thousand atoms at μK (1 millionth of a kelvin) temperatures. Further adding to the difficulties, the propagation of the second sound in liquid helium usually involves no density variation/oscillation. This means that the second sound could not be detected easily with the absorption imaging technique typically used for probing cold atoms, assuming that the strongly interacting Fermi gases behave very much like strongly interacting bosonic liquid helium (4He). (a) Excitation and detection of the second sound in superfluid helium; (b) local heating through the power modulation of an excitation laser beam; (c) the detection of the second sound in a strongly interacting Fermi gas with direct absorption imaging. Recently, the group of Professor Rudolf Grimm from the University of Innsbruck (Austria), in collaboration with a theoretical team from the Trento University (Italy) led by Professors Sandro Stringari and Lev Pitaevskii, successfully measured the speed of second sound in a resonantly interacting Fermi gas using a simple and elegant method. Their results were published in [5]. To observe the second sound, the authors created a local heat pulse at the center of an elongated trapped gas by creating a short burst of modulation to the power of a light beam intercepting this gas (see Fig. 1b). They then measured the speed of the second sound by observing the movement of a thermal-induced density dip along the elongated gas (Fig. 1c). Taking advantage of the inhomogeneous density distributions of the superfluid atoms in the trap, they ingeniously determined the temperature dependence of the superfluid fraction without needing to vary the temperature of the samples. The observation of the second sound in the strongly interacting Fermi gases opens up a new horizon for studying the superfluid properties with tunable interactions. Knowing the speed of second sound can provide a lot of valuable information, allowing physicists working on many-body theories to falsify their models and theories. It demonstrates the importance of using experimentally measured quantities, such as the equation of state employed here, to calibrate and to supplement theoretical investigations. Significant new advances will follow in the understanding of superfluidity of many strongly interacting particles, where faithful theoretical modeling and calculations are impossible at the microscopic level.
Mechanical pumping and filtering of spin-polarized condensate were realized in the superfluid 3He^{3}\text{He}3He A1{\text{A}}_{1}A1​ phase by the pneumatic pumping action of an electrostatically actuated diaphragm. Spin pumping increased the net spin polarization by 20−−50 20--50\text{ }%20−−50  as measured by the induced pressure change during spin pumping. The observed spin relaxation time was consistent with the increased spin polarization. These observations demonstrate the feasibility of using spin pumping to substantially increase the effective magnetic field to which the A1{\text{A}}_{1}A1​ phase is exposed.
We carried out experiments on a spin polarized 3He- 4He mixture with 3He concentration x 3 = 6.26 × 10−4, and on pure 3He liquid. Spin polarization affects the transport properties of these Fermi systems. The effect on momentum transport was studied by using a vibrating-wire viscometer to measure viscosity of the 3He-4He mixture over the temperature range 6.09 mK–100 mK in 7.96 T and 1.00 T magnetic fields. A large viscosity increase was observed upon application of the 7.96 T magnetic field for temperature T < TF(TF = 19.5 mK is the Fermi temperature). The observed viscosity is in very good agreement with theoretical calculations for a dilute Fermi gas by Jeon and Mullin [1988, 1989] and Mullin and Jeon [1992]. The polarization effect on spin transport was investigated by measuring the transverse diffusion coefficient D ⊥ in pure 3He liquid at saturated vapor pressure and at 15.85 bar over the temperature range 4.5 mK–159 mK in a 7.96 T magnetic field. We used a pulsed NMR spin echo technique in a field gradient of 16.0 G/cm to do the measurements and fits to the Leggett equations [1970] to obtain D⊥. For T < 20 mK, we found D⊥ is less than measured in earlier experiments at lower magnetic fields. D⊥ does not increase with decreasing temperature as 1/T2, but appears to approach a constant as T → 0 while it is expected that the longitudinal spin diffusion coefficient D∥ ∝ 1/ T2. This is called spin diffusion anisotropy and it was observed for the first time in our 3He liquid experiments. The anisotropy temperature we determined for 3He liquid was Ta = 16.4 ± 2.2 mK at saturated vapor pressure and in a 7.96 T magnetic field. The transverse spin diffusion in 3 He results agree qualitatively with theories proposed by Meyerovich and Musaeflan [1992, 1994]. They also agree qualitatively with theories proposed by Golosov and Ruckenstein [1995, 1998] by extrapolation of the dilute theory to a strongly interacting system.
Helium stays in liquid form down to absolute zero temperature. Since the effects of quantum mechanics become particularly evident at low temperatures, helium is an ideal system for experimental studies of macroscopic quantum phenomena. One of the most remarkable of these is the transition into zero-viscosity superfluid phase. In case of fermionic helium-3 isotope, this transition occurs at temperatures below 0.003 K. In the low-temperature B phase of superfluid helium-3, the transport of both mass and magnetization occur without losses. The spin superfluidity gives rise to spontaneous coherent long-living precession of magnetization observed in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) experiments. The coherent precession can be described in terms of spin-wave excitations, or in the language of Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of magnon quasiparticles. In this dissertation, we trap these quasiparticle condensates at selected locations in the superfluid order parameter texture, using both textural and magnetic energies for confinement. The sample is cooled to ultra-low temperatures in rotating adiabatic demagnetization refrigerator. Careful characterization of the creation and the decay of the trapped magnon BEC reveals nonhydrodynamic spin diffusion as the main temperature-dependent source of relaxation. Using this property, we suggest magnon-BEC-based microkelvin thermometry in helium-3 systems. Both the relaxation rate and the precession frequency of magnetization are sensitive to changes in the properties of the surrounding superfluid at the lowest temperatures and clearly more informative than conventional NMR techniques which freeze to a temperature-independent state. Here we have used the magnon BECs to detect quantized vortices, gravity waves on the free surface of superfluid, and long-living textural defects related to the creation and the annihilation of phase boundaries. We have also found enhanced zero-temperature relaxation of magnon BEC due to free surface. We propose that it originates from the bound quasiparticle states at the surface which supposedly have Majorana nature following from the topology of helium-3. Owing to diverse properties, superfluid helium-3 serves as an experimentally accessible model system for phenomena elsewhere in physics. We have found self-trapping of magnons towards a box-like confinement potential via coupling with the order parameter which resembles the Q-ball in quantum field theories. We have also observed the interplay between three low-energy spin-wave modes, one of which acquires mass due to spin-orbit interaction and becomes similar to the light Higgs particle considered in extensions of Standard Model.