We review recent experiments in which superfluid 3He has been studied under highly controlled confinement in nanofluidic sample chambers. We discuss the experimental challenges and their resolution. These methods open the way to a systematic investigation of the superfluidity of 3He films, and the surface and edge excitations of topological superfluids.

A direct, high-resolution measurement from lunar orbit of the location of high concentrations of 3He in the lunar regolith is needed for the initiation of cost-effective mining operations on the moon. Gamma-ray spectroscopy has been successfully used to map the abundances and distributions of certain elements present in planetary regoliths. Helium-3 is unique among these elements since the gamm...

The structure of the electronically excited states of 3He and 4He clusters is investigated using fluorescence excitation spectroscopy. Distinct bands are observed energetically close to atomic 1s-ns, nd, np transitions and attributed to perturbed excited He atomiclike states with different principle and orbital quantum numbers. The line shifts and widths of the bands of 3He and 4He clusters of ...

Small weakly bound boson-fermion 4He(m) 3He(n) clusters formed in a free jet expansion are identified using nondestructive transmission grating diffraction. The observations confirm the existence of more than 11 very tenuous complexes including the three-body halo molecule 4He2 3He and the pseudo-Borromean complex 4He2 3He2. Effective cluster formation temperatures, extracted from a sudden free...

A high precision torsional oscillator has been used to study 3He films of thickness from 100 to 350 nm, in the temperature range 5<T<200 mK. This thickness is much smaller than the viscous penetration depth, and also much smaller than the low temperature inelastic mean-free path of 3He quasiparticles. Such films are observed to decouple from the motion of the oscillator below 60 mK. We interpre...

The B phase of superfluid 3He is a three-dimensional time-reversal invariant topological superfluid, predicted to support gapless Majorana surface states. We confine superfluid 3He into a thin nanofluidic slab geometry. In the presence of a weak symmetry-breaking magnetic field, we have observed two possible states of the confined 3He-B phase manifold, through the small tipping angle NMR respon...

Linear defects are generic in continuous media. In quantum systems they appear as topological line defects which are associated with a circulating persistent current. In relativistic quantum vacuum they are known as cosmic strings, in superconductors as quantized flux lines, and in superfluids and low-density atomic Bose-Einstein condensates as quantized vortex lines. We discuss unconventional ...