arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to J. I. A. Li.
We have studied the acoustic Faraday effect in superfluid 3He up to significantly larger magnetic fields than in previous experiments achieving rotations of the polarization of transverse sound as large as 1710^{\circ}. We report nonlinear field effects, and use the linear results to determine the Zeeman splitting of the imaginary squashing mode (ISQ) frequency in 3He-B.
A rich variety of Fermi systems condense by forming bound pairs, including high temperature [1] and heavy fermion [2] superconductors, Sr2RuO4 [3], cold atomic gases [4], and superfluid 3He [5]. Some of these form exotic quantum states having non-zero orbital angular momentum. We have discovered, in the case of 3He, that anisotropic disorder, engineered from highly porous silica aerogel, stabilizes a chiral superfluid state that otherwise would not exist. Additionally, we find that the chiral axis of this state can be uniquely oriented with the application of a magnetic field perpendicular to the aerogel anisotropy axis. At suffciently low temperature we observe a sharp transition from a uniformly oriented chiral state to a disordered structure consistent with locally ordered domains, contrary to expectations for a superfluid glass phase [6].
Superfluid 3He confined to high porosity silica aerogel is the paradigm system for understanding impurity effects in unconventional superconductors. However, a crucial first step has been elusive; exact identification of the microscopic states of the superfluid in the presence of quenched disorder. Using a new class of highly uniform aerogel materials, we report pulsed nuclear magnetic resonance experiments that demonstrate definitively that the two observed superfluid states in aerogel are impure versions of the isotropic and axial p-wave states. The theoretically predicted destruction of long-range orbital order (Larkin-Imry Ma effect) in the impure axial state is not observed.