Vortex-loop calculation of the specific heat of superfluid $^4$He under pressure

TL;DR

This paper uses vortex-loop renormalization to accurately compute the specific heat of superfluid helium-4 near the lambda transition across various pressures, aligning well with experimental data and highlighting issues in recent simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a vortex-loop based method to calculate the specific heat of superfluid helium-4 under pressure, improving agreement with experiments and addressing previous simulation discrepancies.

Findings

Specific heat calculations match experimental data within 5%

Non-universal critical amplitude is about four times larger than experiments

Identifies problems with recent Gross-Pitaevskii simulation results

Abstract

Vortex-loop renormalization is used to compute the specific heat of superfluid $^4$He near the lambda point at various pressures up to 26 bars. The input parameters are the the pressure dependence of T$_\lambda$ and the superfluid density, which determine the non-universal parameters of the vortex core energy and core size. The results for the specific heat are found to be in good agreement with experimental data, matching the expected universal pressure dependence to within about 5$\%$. The non-universal critical amplitude of the specific heat is found to be in reasonable agreement, a factor of four larger than the experiments. We point out problems with recent Gross-Pitaevskii simulations that claimed the vortex-loop percolation temperature did not match the critical temperature of the superfluid phase transition.