No Arabic abstract
Kelvin waves or Kelvons have been known for a long time as gapless excitations propagating along superfluid vortices. These modes can be interpreted as the Nambu-Goldstone excitations arising from the spontaneous breaking of the translational symmetry. Recently a different type of gapless excitation localized on strings -- the so-called non-Abelian mode -- attracted much attention in high-energy physics. We discuss their relevance in condensed matter physics. Although we failed to find exactly gapless non-Abelian modes, non-Abelian rotational quasigapless excitations are argued to exist on the mass vortices in the B phase of the superfluid 3He, due to the fact that the order parameter in 3He-B is tensorial. While the U(1) rotational excitations are well established in vortices with asymmetric cores, the non-Abelian rotational excitations belonging to the same family were not considered. In the general case they are coupled with the translational modes.
We describe the first measurement on Andreev scattering of thermal excitations from a vortex configuration with known density, spatial extent, and orientations in 3He-B superfluid. The heat flow from a blackbody radiator in equilibrium rotation at constant angular velocity is measured with two quartz tuning fork oscillators. One oscillator creates a controllable density of excitations at 0.2Tc base temperature and the other records the thermal response. The results are compared to numerical calculations of ballistic propagation of thermal quasiparticles through a cluster of rectilinear vortices.
A brane-world $SU(5)$ GUT model with global non-Abelian vortices is constructed in six-dimensional spacetime. We find a solution with a vortex associated to $SU(3)$ separated from another vortex associated to $SU(2)$. This $3-2$ split configuration achieves a geometric Higgs mechanism for $SU(5)to SU(3)times SU(2)times U(1)$ symmetry breaking. A simple deformation potential induces a domain wall between non-Abelian vortices, leading to a linear confining potential. The confinement stabilizes the vortex separation moduli, and assures the vorticity of $SU(3)$ group and of $SU(2)$ group to be identical. This dictates the equality of the numbers of fermion zero modes in the fundamental representation of $SU(3)$ (quarks) and of $SU(2)$ (leptons), leading to quark-lepton generations. The standard model massless gauge fields are localized on the non-Abelian vortices thanks to a field-dependent gauge kinetic function. We perform fluctuation analysis with an appropriate gauge fixing and obtain a four-dimensional effective Lagrangian of unbroken and broken gauge fields at quadratic order. We find that $SU(3) times SU(2) times U(1)$ gauge fields are localized on the vortices and exactly massless. Complications in analyzing the spectra of gauge fields with the nontrivial gauge kinetic function are neatly worked out by a vector-analysis like method.
Vortex flow remains laminar up to large Reynolds numbers (Re~1000) in a cylinder filled with 3He-B. This is inferred from NMR measurements and numerical vortex filament calculations where we study the spin up and spin down responses of the superfluid component, after a sudden change in rotation velocity. In normal fluids and in superfluid 4He these responses are turbulent. In 3He-B the vortex core radius is much larger which reduces both surface pinning and vortex reconnections, the phenomena, which enhance vortex bending and the creation of turbulent tangles. Thus the origin for the greater stability of vortex flow in 3He-B is a quantum phenomenon. Only large flow perturbations are found to make the responses turbulent, such as the walls of a cubic container or the presence of invasive measuring probes inside the container.
We describe measurements of the decay of pure superfluid turbulence in superfluid 3He-B, in the low temperature regime where the normal fluid density is negligible. We follow the decay of the turbulence generated by a vibrating grid as detected by vibrating wire resonators. Despite the absence of any classical normal fluid dissipation processes, the decay is consistent with turbulence having the classical Kolmogorov energy spectrum and is remarkably similar to that measured in superfluid 4He at relatively high temperatures. Further, our results strongly suggest that the decay is governed by the superfluid circulation quantum rather than kinematic viscosity.
In a rotating two-phase sample of 3He-B and magnetic-field stabilized 3He-A the large difference in mutual friction dissipation at 0.20 Tc gives rise to unusual vortex flow responses. We use noninvasive NMR techniques to monitor spin down and spin up of the B-phase superfluid component to a sudden change in the rotation velocity. Compared to measurements at low field with no A-phase, where these responses are laminar in cylindrically symmetric flow, spin down with vortices extending across the AB interface is found to be faster, indicating enhanced dissipation from turbulence. Spin up in turn is slower, owing to rapid annihilation of remanent vortices before the rotation increase. As confirmed by both our NMR signal analysis and vortex filament calculations, these observations are explained by the additional force acting on the B-phase vortex ends at the AB interface.