The superfluid phases of 3He provide a unique physical system to study the dynamical effects of spontaneous symmetry breaking in condensed matter. The theory of superfluid 3He is grounded in what are arguably two of the most successful theories of strongly interacting matter, Landau’s Fermi-liquid theory and the BCS pairing theory of superconductivity. These two theories were placed into a comm...

we have used a variational approach to calculate some thermodynamic properties of the quasi-one dimensional liquid 3he such as the energy, entropy, free energy, equation of state and heat capacity at finite temperature. we have employed the lennard-jones potential as the inter-atomic interaction. we have seen that the total energy increases by increasing both temperature and density. as expecte...

A central part of the story of the discovery of superfluid 3He is the cooling technique used for the experiments, the Pomeranchuk effect. Although it is not an especially useful technique for obtaining low temperatures today, it contains my favorite example of the use of the Clausius-Clapeyron equation. The cooling technique is fun to describe in undergraduate physics classes on thermodynamics....

In this paper, we address the relations between the structure, electronic level structure, energetics, and localization dynamics of an excess electron in a bubble in liquid 4He, 3He, and Ne. Our treatment of the dynamics of formation for the electron bubble rests on a quantum mechanical Wigner-Seitz description of the excess electron in conjunction with a hydrodynamic picture for the liquid. Th...

When immersed in liquid 3He, the nanometer strands of aerogel are coated with a thin layer of solid 3He, forming a network of irregular nanotubes. Owing to its high purity and weak interactions, this system is ideal for studying fundamental processes. We report the first experiments on solid 3He in aerogel at ultralow temperatures, cooled by direct adiabatic demagnetization. Simultaneous nuclea...

Superfluid 3He confined in aerogel offers a unique chance to study the effects of a short mean free path on the properties of a well defined superfluid Fermi liquid with anisotropic pairing. Transport coefficients and collective excitations, e.g. longitudinal sound, are expected to react sensitively to a short mean free path and to offer the possibility for testing recently developed models for...

The proposed design of a fuel pellet containing liquid 3He enclosed in a spherical Be shell of 300 μm thickness and overcoated with D2 solid appears to be adequate for fueling large size d/3He tokamaks. Smaller pellets of this design could be used for near-term experiments. The pellet fabrication should be simple and the components are non-radioactive.

In this review we first present an introduction to 3He and to the ROTA collaboration under which most of the knowledge on vortices in superfluid 3He has been obtained. In the physics part, we start from the exceptional properties of helium at millikelvin temperatures. The dilemma of rotating superfluids is presented. In 4He and in 3He-B the problem is solved by nucleating an array of singular v...