Hydrostatic theory of superfluid 3He-B

TL;DR

This paper reviews the texture theory of superfluid 3He-B, introduces new results on surface and bulk parameters across temperatures, and compares theoretical predictions with experimental data.

Contribution

It provides new insights into surface and bulk parameters of superfluid 3He-B and assesses the validity of the strong-coupling model across temperatures.

Findings

Surface parameters in the Ginzburg-Landau region characterized

Bulk parameters at arbitrary temperatures determined

Agreement with experiments for certain quantities, including dipole-dipole interaction

Abstract

The determination of the texture of the order parameter is important for understanding many experiments in superfluid 3He. In addition to reviewing the theory of textures in superfluid 3He-B we give several new results, in particular on the surface parameters in the Ginzburg-Landau region and bulk parameters at arbitrary temperature. Special attention is paid to separate the results that are valid at all temperatures from those which are limited to the Ginzburg-Landau region. We study the validity of a trivial strong-coupling model, where the energy gap of the weak-coupling theory is scaled by a temperature dependent factor. We compare the theory with several experiments. For some quantities the theory seems to work fine and we extract the dipole-dipole interaction parameter from the measurements.