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SCANnews A Glimpse of Supersolid

SOLID HELIUM CAN BEHAVE LIKE A SUPERFLUID BY GRAHAM P. COLLINS

Solids and liquids could hardly seem more different, one maintaining a rig-id shape and the other fl owing to fi t the

contours of whatever contains it. And of all the things that slosh and pour, superfl uids seem to capture the quintessence of the liq-uid state—running through tiny channels with no resistance and even dribbling uphill to escape from a bowl.

A superfl uid solid sounds like an oxymo-ron, but it is precisely what researchers at Pennsylvania State University have recently witnessed. Physicists Mo-ses Chan and Eun-Seong Kim saw the behavior in helium 4 that was com-pressed into solidity and chilled to near absolute zero. Although the super-solid behavior had been suggested as a theoretical possibility as long ago as 1969, its demonstration poses deep mysteries.

Rotation is one way that superfl uids reveal their peculiar properties. Take a bucket of ordinary liquid helium and rotate it slowly, then cool it down to about two kelvins, so that some of the helium becomes su-perfluid. The superfluid fraction will not rotate. Be-cause part of the helium is motionless, the amount of force required to set the bucket and helium rotating is less than it would be oth-erwise. Technically, the helium’s rotational inertia decreases.

Chan and Kim observed such a decrease of rotational inertia in a ring of solid helium. They applied about 26 atmospheres of pres-sure to liquid helium, forcing the atoms to lock in place and thereby form a fi xed lattice. They observed the oscillations of the helium as it twisted back and forth on the end of a metal rod. The period of these torsional os-cillations depended on the rotational inertia

of the helium; the oscillations occurred more rapidly when the inertia went down, just as if the mass of the helium decreased. Amaz-ingly, they found that about 1 percent of the helium ring remained motionless while the other 99 percent continued rotating as nor-mal. One solid could somehow move effort-lessly through another.

So how can a solid behave like a super-fl uid? All bulk liquid superfl uids are caused by Bose-Einstein condensation, which is the quantum process whereby a large number of

particles all enter the same quantum state. Chan and Kim’s result therefore sug-gests that 1 percent of the atoms in the solid helium somehow form a Bose-Einstein condensate even while they remain at fi xed lattice positions. That seems like a contradiction in terms, but the exchange of atoms between lattice sites might allow it. A characteristic of helium would tend to promote such an exchange—name-ly, its large zero-point motion, which is the in-herent jiggling of atoms that represents a mini-mum amount of move-ment required by quan-tum uncertainty. (It is the reason helium ordinarily only occurs as a gas or a liquid: the extremely light-weight atoms jiggle about

too much to form a solid.) Supporting the idea of condensation, the two researchers did not see superfl uidity in solid helium 3, an iso-tope of helium that as a liquid undergoes a kind of condensation and becomes superfl uid only at temperatures far below that needed by liquid helium 4.

Another possibility is that the crystal of helium contains numerous defects and lat-tice vacancies (yet another effect of the zero-point motion). These defects and vacancies

Pennsylvania State University physicists Moses Chan and Eun-

Seong Kim recently succeeded in creating a solid that acts like a superfl uid. They used helium 4 (the original superfl uid, which

goes “super” when the liquid is cooled below 2.17 kelvins) that

was extremely pure. It contained no more than 0.3 part per million

of helium’s other isotope, helium 3 (which goes super in a more

complicated fashion at the much chillier temperature of two millikelvins).

In a previous experiment, using helium embedded in the

nanoscopic interstices of porous glass, the two physicists

observed evidence of supersolidity, but only in samples containing less than 0.01 percent helium 3. The results suggest why

previous efforts to observe supersolid helium failed—insuffi ciently pure helium.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING PURE

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Aluminum shellSUPERSOLID HELIUM partly rotates and partly stays still as its suspended aluminum-shelled container rotates.

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SCANnews

A fter taking spectacular close-ups of Saturn and its rings, the Cassini space-craft turned its attention to Titan,

Saturn’s largest moon. Using imaging radar, the spacecraft peered through Titan’s smog blanket—its thick orange atmosphere, con-sisting primarily of nitrogen and trace amounts of at least a dozen kinds of organ-ic compounds, extends hundreds of kilome-ters above the surface. Making its closest approach of 1,200 kilometers on October 26, Cassini was able to resolve features down to 300 meters across while traveling at 21,800 kilometers per hour. It mapped roughly 1 percent of a satellite world larger than either Mercury or Pluto.

The images returned so far have aston-ished scientists. Cassini has not detected any signs of the long-predicted gasolinelike seas of methane, propane or butane that are speculated to be as much as three kilometers deep. But investigators were quick to point out that the data did not preclude their ex-istence, either. Perhaps more surprising, Cassini found hardly any evidence of impact craters. The lack of craters suggests that Ti-tan, made of equal parts water ice and rocky matter, is continuously reshaping itself.

Indeed, one strikingly bright feature looks very much like something oozed across the freezing (–178 degrees Celsius) surface—perhaps icy “lava” spewed by a “cryovolcano.” Elsewhere, streaks on the surface could be fl owing liquid hydrocar-bons, a moving ice sheet like a glacier, or matter blown over the ground by wind. An-other region resembling a feline’s head,

dubbed “the Halloween cat,” might be a lake, judging by its relative smoothness. On Christmas Eve, Cassini was to have de-ployed the European Space Agency’s piggy-backed Huygens probe to streak through the moon’s atmosphere for a better look. If all goes well, it will land—or splash down—

on Titan on January 14.

Charles Q. Choi, based in New York City, is a frequent contributor.

Through Titan’s HazeSATURN MOON HAS A SURFACE THAT IS DYNAMIC— AND PUZZLING BY CHARLES Q. CHOI

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could be what, in effect, undergo Bose-Ein-stein condensation.

But all those theories seem to imply that the superfl uidity would vary with the pres-sure, yet Chan and Kim see roughly the same effect all the way from 26 to 66 atmo-spheres. Douglas D. Osheroff of Stanford University, the co-discoverer of superfl uid-

ity in helium 3, calls the lack of pressure dependence “more than a bit bewildering.” He says that Chan and Kim have done “all the obvious experiments to search for some artifact.” If they are correct, Osheroff adds, then “I don’t understand how supersolids become super. I hope the theorists are think-ing about it seriously.”

IC Y “L AVA” is one explanation for the “oozing” seen on the surface of Titan. This artist rendition is based on Cassini data, such as the image showing surface material streaking across the moon (right).

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