15 research outputs found
Quantum cavitation in liquid He: dissipation effects
We have investigated the effect that dissipation may have on the cavitation
process in normal liquid He. Our results indicate that a rather small
dissipation decreases sizeably the quantum-to-thermal crossover temperature
for cavitation in normal liquid He. This is a possible explanation
why recent experiments have not yet found clear evidence of quantum cavitation
at temperatures below the predicted by calculations which neglect
dissipation.Comment: To be published in Physical Review B6
Cavitation pressure in liquid helium
Recent experiments have suggested that, at low enough temperature, the
homogeneous nucleation of bubbles occurs in liquid helium near the calculated
spinodal limit. This was done in pure superfluid helium 4 and in pure normal
liquid helium 3. However, in such experiments, where the negative pressure is
produced by focusing an acoustic wave in the bulk liquid, the local amplitude
of the instantaneous pressure or density is not directly measurable. In this
article, we present a series of measurements as a function of the static
pressure in the experimental cell. They allowed us to obtain an upper bound for
the cavitation pressure P_cav (at low temperature, P_cav < -2.4 bar in helium
3, P_cav < -8.0 bar in helium 4). From a more precise study of the acoustic
transducer characteristics, we also obtained a lower bound (at low temperature,
P_cav > -3.0 bar in helium 3, P_cav > - 10.4 bar in helium 4). In this article
we thus present quantitative evidence that cavitation occurs at low temperature
near the calculated spinodal limit (-3.1 bar in helium 3 and -9.5 bar in helium
4). Further information is also obtained on the comparison between the two
helium isotopes. We finally discuss the magnitude of nonlinear effects in the
focusing of a sound wave in liquid helium, where the pressure dependence of the
compressibility is large.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figure
Cavitation induced by explosion in a model of ideal fluid
We discuss the problem of an explosion in the cubic-quintic superfluid model,
in relation to some experimental observations. We show numerically that an
explosion in such a model might induce a cavitation bubble for large enough
energy. This gives a consistent view for rebound bubbles in superfluid and we
indentify the loss of energy between the successive rebounds as radiated waves.
We compute self-similar solution of the explosion for the early stage, when no
bubbles have been nucleated. The solution also gives the wave number of the
excitations emitted through the shock wave.Comment: 21 pages,13 figures, other comment
Cavitation of Electrons Bubbles in Liquid Helium Below saturation Pressure
We have used a Hartree-type electron-helium potential together with a density
functional description of liquid He and He to study the explosion of
electron bubbles submitted to a negative pressure. The critical pressure at
which bubbles explode has been determined as a function of temperature. It has
been found that this critical pressure is very close to the pressure at which
liquid helium becomes globally unstable in the presence of electrons. It is
shown that at high temperatures the capillary model overestimates the critical
pressures. We have checked that a commonly used and rather simple
electron-helium interaction yields results very similar to those obtained using
the more accurate Hartree-type interaction. We have estimated that the
crossover temperature for thermal to quantum nucleation of electron bubbles is
very low, of the order of 6 mK for He.Comment: 22 pages, 9 figure
Cavitation in superfluid helium-4 at low temperature
We have studied the nucleation of bubbles in pure superfluid helium-4 at
temperatures
down to 65 mK. We have found that the nucleation is a stochastic process,
and that at
temperatures below 600 mK the nucleation rate is independent of
temperature. These
results are consistent with the assumption that the nucleation takes place
via quantum tunneling