Special Condensed Matter Seminar

David A. Huse
Princeton University

Wednesday, April 19, 2006
1:00 pm in SPL 52

Supersolids?

Abstract: Recent experiments by Kim and Chan, and very recently Reppy and coworkers, have seen signs of superfluidity within samples of solid helium-4. This raises a number of interesting questions: Can superfluidity exist within the equilibrium ground state of solid helium? What properties must a quantum solid have to be also superfluid? A normal solid is a self-assembled Mott insulator, while a supersolid is self-doped so it has carriers that can Bose condense. The measured supersolidity may alternatively be due to extended defects in a not-fully-annealled normal solid: a dislocation line can be a superfluid wire, while a grain boundary can be superfluid "film".