Roton-like mode in solid He-4

TL;DR

This paper reports the discovery of a roton-like excitation mode in solid helium-4, providing direct evidence for delocalized vacancy modes that could be linked to supersolidity phenomena.

Contribution

It presents the first direct observation of a roton-like mode in solid He-4, revealing coherent delocalized vacancy excitations through inelastic neutron scattering.

Findings

Identification of a roton-like excitation branch in solid He-4

The mode's effective mass is close to that of rotons in superfluid helium

The excitation coexists with acoustic phonons and differs from conventional optic phonons

Abstract

Recent theoretical and experimental work on solid He-4 has focused on vacancies, or other lattice defects and whether these can form a Bose-Einstein condensate within the solid. The earliest suggestion that this could happen was based on the conjecture that the ground state of the solid at T = 0 K would include vacancies. Although no direct evidence for zero point vacancies has been presented, a variety of experimental observations have been interpreted as being due to thermally activated vacancies. Here we directly probe the excitation spectrum of hcp solid He-4 using inelastic neutron scattering. We identify a branch of delocalized excitations, with both longitudinal and transverse dispersion that coexist with acoustic phonons. While the energy gap is larger and the characteristic wavevector is shifted to coincide with the position of the (100) Bragg peak, the longitudinal effective mass of this mode is within 15% of that for rotons in superfluid He-4. The dispersion relation intersects the longitudinal acoustic phonon half way to the zone boundary, and this distinguishes the mode from a conventional optic phonon. Our results provide direct evidence for coherent delocalized non-phonon excitations in solid helium, which we identify as delocalized vacancy modes.