"Supersolids?"
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Date: 03-29-2006
Start Time:
4:00pm
End Time: 5:00pm
Speaker: David Huse
From:
Princeton University
Location: Interschool Lab, 7th floor, Schapiro/CEPSR
Hosted by:
Center for Integrated Science
Abstract:
Recent experiments by Kim and Chan, and very recently Reppy and coworkers, have seen signs of superfluidity within samples of solid helium-4. This raises a number of interesting questions: Can superfluidity exist within the equilibrium ground state of solid helium? What properties must a quantum solid have to be also superfluid? A normal solid is a self-assembled Mott insulator, while a supersolid is self-doped so it has carriers that can Bose condense. The measured supersolidity may alternatively be due to extended defects in a not-fully-annealled normal solid: a dislocation line can be a superfluid wire, while a grain boundary can be superfluid "film".