Liquid Helium Films
Publications:
- Penanen,
K., Fukuto, M., Heilmann, R. K., Silvera, I. F. and Pershan, P. S.
"Low temperature studies of 4He liquid-vapor interface. Phys.
Rev. (to appear Oct. 2000).
- Penanen,
K., Fukuto, M., Silvera, I. F. and Pershan, P. S. " X-Ray induced
thinning of 3He and 3He/4He mixtures. "Phys. Rev. B (to appear
Oct. 2000)
People working on the project:
Some relevant data can be found here
AFM data was analyzed using home-made AFM
analysis program
Also available is liquid helium 100 liter
container calibration
As should be clear from the title, we study thin (about 200
Å) helium films. It is hard to resolve details of their
structure by conventional means (visible light), so we use X-Rays (of
wavelength ~ 1.5 Å) to achieve our goal. The most common
technique that we use is X-Ray Specular
Reflectivity. The experiments are performed mainly at the
National Synchrotron Light Source, Brookhaven National Lab, but most
of the preparation work is done at Harvard, using the Rotating Anode
facility. To cool the sample to liquid helium temperatures we use a
vapor-cooled helium cryostat named Syncryo
(derived from synchrotron and cryostat). The lowest temperature
achieved in it was 0.39 K. This temperature is sufficiently low to
condense even the lighter helium isotope, 3He.
Have you ever wondered how people ever get to those temperatures? For
an interactive show, please follow this
link.
Parallel to the show above, here is the detailed cross-linked
interactive photo album of the system
components.
To learn more about the earlies phases of this work, please look into
the relevant publications:
- Get a postscript version of
our abstract in the 1995 BNL annual report.
- X-Ray Induced Electrostatic Charging of Helium Films.
K.Penanen, P.S
Pershan, M.J. Regan and I.F.
Silvera
Journal of Low Temperature Physics, vol.101, no.3/4,
p.489 (1995)
- L.B.Lurio, T.A Rabedeau, P.S. Pershan and I.F Silvera,
Physica B 169, 507 (1990).
- L.B.Lurio, T.A Rabedeau, P.S. Pershan, I.F Silvera, M.
Deutsch, S.D. Kosowsky and B.M. Ocko, Phys. Rev. Lett.
68, 2628 (1992).
- L.B.Lurio, T.A Rabedeau, P.S. Pershan, I.F Silvera, M.
Deutsch, S.D. Kosowsky and B.M. Ocko, Phys. Rev.
48, 9644 (1993).