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Physics Today

Stationary Vortex Arrays

Gloria B. Lubkin

Published Dec 1, 1979• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Take a good look at these photographs; eventually they will probably be in many textbooks. These photographs represent visual evidence for macroscopic quantization in rotating supertluid helium and are the latest in a series of experiments by Richard Packard and his collaborators at the University of California, Berkeley. E. J. Yarmchuk, M. J. V. Gordon and Packard recently published these pictures in Phys. Rev. Lett. 43, 214 (1979). These patterns display the model structure of the stationary states of a single macroscopic wave function describing superfluidity.

DOI
10.1063/1.3268839

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Take a good look at these photographs; eventually they will probably be in many textbooks. These photographs represent visual evidence for macroscopic quantization in rotating supertluid helium and are the latest in a series of experiments by Richard Packard and his collaborators at the University of California, Berkeley. E. J. Yarmchuk, M. J. V. Gordon and Packard recently published these pictures in Phys. Rev. Lett. 43, 214 (1979). These patterns display the model structure of the stationary states of a single macroscopic wave function describing superfluidity.
Within density functional theory, we have studied the interplay between vortex arrays and capillary waves in spinning prolate 4He^{4}\mathrm{He}4He droplets made of several thousand helium atoms. Surface capillary waves are ubiquitous in prolate superfluid 4He^{4}\mathrm{He}4He droplets, and depending on the size and angular momentum of the droplet, they may coexist with vortex arrays. We have found that the equilibrium configuration of small prolate droplets is vortex free, evolving towards vortex hosting as the droplet size increases. This result is in agreement with a recent experiment [O'Connell et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 124, 215301 (2020)] that disclosed that vortex arrays and capillary waves coexist in the equilibrium configuration of very large drops. In contrast to viscous droplets executing rigid-body rotation, the stability phase diagram of spinning 4He^{4}\mathrm{He}4He droplets cannot be universally described in terms of dimensionless angular momentum and angular velocity variables: Instead, the rotational properties of superfluid helium droplets display a clear dependence on the droplet size and the number of vortices they host.
At the Symposium on Quantum Fluids and Solids in Paris this past July, Richard Packard of the University of California, Berkeley, entertained the audience by playing a brief recording: The sound on the tape began as a high-pitched whistle and slid down the frequency scale over a period of a few seconds. What people were hearing was the sound of a superfluid surging rapidly back and forth through the holes in a membrane1 in response to a pressure difference applied across the membrane. This phenomenon is the superfluid analog of the AC Josephson effect for superconductors, according to which a supercurrent will oscillate across a thin tunnel junction under an applied voltage. (A French group had earlier reported evidence of this phenomenon.) In addition to recording the sounds of the mass oscillations, Packard and Seamus Davis and their respective groups at Berkeley found that the measured frequencies agreed with those predicted by the Josephson equations.