Cavitation pressure in liquid helium

We have investigated the quantum-to-thermal crossover temperature T* for cavitation in liquid helium mixtures up to 0.05 3He concentrations. With respect to the pure 4He case, T* is sizeably reduced, to a value below 50 mK for 3He concentrations above 0.02. As in pure 4He, the homogeneous cavitation pressure is systematically found close to the spinodal pressure.

The focusing of acoustic waves is used to study nucleation phenomena in liquids. At large amplitude, non-linear effects are important so that the magnitude of pressure or density oscillations is difficult to predict. We present a calculation of these oscillations in a spherical geometry. We show that the main source of non-linearities is the shape of the equation of state of the liquid, enhanced by the spherical geometry. We also show that the formation of shocks cannot be ...

We report a first attempt to produce metastable hcp solid helium below its melting pressure. A focused sound pulse is emitted along the c-axis of a mono-domain hcp helium-4 crystal starting from a static pressure just above the melting pressure. The sound pulse is made as simple as possible with one negative and one positive swing only. Density at focus is monitored by an optical interferometric method. Performed numerical simulations show that the crystal anisotropy splits t...

A large linewidth of electronic transition of an electron trapped in a bubble ("bubblonium") possesses natural, or radiative, and inhomogeneous components. The latter mechanism of the line broadening requires dissipation. Dissipation of optical-frequency quantum into a liquid helium leads to an emission of an acoustic wave. The possibilities of detection of this acoustic signal are discussed in this paper. Finally, the low temperature analogues with several hard-to-observe as...

The properties of liquid helium have always been a fascinating subject to scientists. The phonon theory of liquids taking into account liquid non-static shear rigidity is employed here for studying internal energy and heat capacity of compressed liquid 4-He. We demonstrate good agreement of calculated and experimental heat capacity of liquid helium at elevated pressures and supercritical temperatures. Unexpectedly helium remains a quantum liquid at elevated pressures for a wi...

We develop a theory in order to describe the effect of relaxation in a condensed medium upon the quantum decay of a metastable liquid near the spinodal at low temperatures. We find that both the regime and the rate of quantum nucleation strongly depend on the relaxation time and its temperature behavior. The quantum nucleation rate slows down with the decrease of the relaxation time. We also discuss the low temperature experiments on cavitation in normal $^3$He and superfluid...

We have investigated the effect that dissipation may have on the cavitation process in normal liquid $^3$He. Our results indicate that a rather small dissipation decreases sizeably the quantum-to-thermal crossover temperature $T^*$ for cavitation in normal liquid $^3$He. This is a possible explanation why recent experiments have not yet found clear evidence of quantum cavitation at temperatures below the $T^*$ predicted by calculations which neglect dissipation.

The electron bubble in superfluid helium has two degrees of freedom that may offer exceptionally low dissipation: the electron's spin and the bubble's motion. If these degrees of freedom can be read out and controlled with sufficient sensitivity, they would provide a novel platform for realizing a range of quantum technologies and for exploring open questions in the physics of superfluid helium. Here we propose a practical scheme for accomplishing this by trapping an electron...

The problem studied in this paper is to obtain the equations describing sound propagation in a consolidated porous medium filled with superfluid, determine the elastic coefficients, appearing in the equations, in terms of physically measurable quantities, and calculate the propagation velocities of transverse and longitudinal waves at high and low oscillating frequencies. In general, the obtained equations describe all volume modes that can propagate in a porous medium satura...

The bubbles involved in sonochemistry and other applications of cavitation oscillate inertially. A correct estimation of the wave attenuation in such bubbly media requires a realistic estimation of the power dissipated by the oscillation of each bubble, by thermal diffusion in the gas and viscous friction in the liquid. Both quantities and calculated numerically for a single inertial bubble driven at 20 kHz, and are found to be several orders of magnitude larger than the line...