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TT: Fachverband Tiefe Temperaturen

TT 30: Matter At Low Temperature: Quantum Liquids, Bose-Einstein Condensates, Ultra-cold Atoms, ... 1

TT 30.8: Invited Talk

Wednesday, March 28, 2012, 17:15–17:45, H 3005

Topological superfluids confined in a regular nano-scale slab geometry — •John Saunders¹, Robert Bennett¹, Lev Levitin¹, Andrew Casey¹, Brian Cowan¹, Jeevak Parpia², Dietmar Drung³, and Thomas Schurig³ — ¹Department of Physics, Royal Holloway University of London, Egham, Surrey, TW20 0EX — ²Department of Physics, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA — ³Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, Abbestrasse 2-12, D-19587, Berlin, Germany

Superfluid 3He confined in a regular nano-fabricated slab geometry provides a model system for the investigation of surface and thin film effects in a p-wave superfluid. We have fabricated and cooled such samples to well below 1 mK for the first time, and investigated their NMR response, exploiting a SQUID NMR spectrometer of exquisite sensitivity. We have used NMR on a 650 nm thick superfluid slab to identify the profound effect of confinement on the relative stability of the A and B phases and to make quantitative measurements of the suppression and surface induced distortion of the order parameter.

In these systems the effective confinement length scale (slab thickness/superfluid coherence length) is the new tuning parameter. Increasing confinement should stabilize new p-wave superfluid states of matter, such as the quasi-2D gapped A phase or the planar phase. Nanofluidic samples of superfluid 3He promise a route to explore topological superfluids and their surface, edge and defect-bound excitations under well controlled conditions.