Single Particle and Fermi Liquid Properties of He-3/--He-4 Mixtures: A Microscopic Analysis

TL;DR

This paper provides a microscopic analysis of He-3 impurities in He-4, calculating their dynamic properties and Fermi liquid interactions, and compares results with experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed microscopic calculation of impurity dynamics and Fermi liquid properties in He-3/He-4 mixtures, linking theory with experimental observations.

Findings

The impurity excitation spectrum shows reduced pole strength consistent with experiments.

Impurity motion is damped at high momentum due to decay into rotons.

Calculated effective masses and Fermi liquid parameters agree with recent measurements.

Abstract

We calculate microscopically the properties of the dilute He-3 component in a He-3/--He-4 mixture. These depend on both, the dominant interaction between the impurity atom and the background, and the Fermi liquid contribution due to the interaction between the constituents of the He-3 component. We first calculate the dynamic structure function of a He-3 impurity atom moving in He-3. From that we obtain the excitation spectrum and the momentum dependent effective mass. The pole strength of this excitation mode is strongly reduced from the free particle value in agreement with experiments; part of the strength is distributed over high frequency excitations. Above k > 1.7$\AA$^{-1}$ the motion of the impurity is damped due to the decay into a roton and a low energy impurity mode. Next we determine the Fermi--Liquid interaction between He-4 atoms and calculate the pressure-- and concentration dependence of the effective mass, magnetic susceptibility, and the He-3--He-3 scattering phase shifts. The calculations are based on a dynamic theory that uses, as input, effective interactions provided by the Fermi hypernetted--chain theory. The relationship between both theories is discussed. Our theoretical effective masses agree well with recent measurements by Yorozu et al. (Phys. Rev. B 48, 9660 (1993)) as well as those by R. Simons and R. M. Mueller (Czekoslowak Journal of Physics Suppl. 46, 201 (1996)), but our analysis suggests a new extrapolation to the zero-concentration limit. With that effective mass we also find a good agreement with the measured Landau parameter F_0^a.