Anisotropic phases of superfluid ^{3}he in compressed aerogel

Phys Rev Lett. 2015 Mar 13;114(10):105302. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.105302. Epub 2015 Mar 10.

Abstract

It has been shown that the relative stabilities of various superfluid states of ^{3}He can be influenced by anisotropy in a silica aerogel framework. We prepared a suite of aerogel samples compressed up to 30% for which we performed pulsed NMR on ^{3}He imbibed within the aerogel. We identified A and B phases and determined their magnetic field-temperature phase diagrams as a function of strain. From these results, we infer that the B phase is distorted by negative strain forming an anisotropic superfluid state more stable than the A phase.