Renormalization-group theory for rotating 4He near the superfluid transition

TL;DR

This paper develops a renormalization-group theory to analyze how uniform rotation affects the superfluid transition of liquid helium-4, showing that rotation smooths the transition and introduces vortex-related mutual friction.

Contribution

It introduces a novel RG approach based on model F to study rotating superfluid helium-4 near T_lambda, predicting a smooth crossover and defining a rotation-dependent transition temperature.

Findings

Rotation smooths the superfluid transition near T_lambda.

A power law for the rotation-dependent transition temperature T_lambda(Omega) is predicted.

Mutual friction coefficients B and B' are calculated for the vortex dynamics.

Abstract

The influence of a uniform rotation with frequency Omega on the critical behavior of liquid 4He near T_lambda is investigated. We apply our recently developed approach which is a renormalization-group theory based on model F starting with the calculation of the Green's function in Hartree approximation. We calculate the specific heat, the correlation length, and the thermal resistivity tensor as functions of the temperature T for fixed values of the rotation frequency Omega. For nonzero Omega we find that all physical quantities are smooth near T_lambda so that the superfluid transition is a smooth crossover. We define a frequency-dependent transition temperature T_lambda(Omega) by the maximum of the specific heat and present a power law prediction. For T<T_lambda(Omega) we find mutual friction between the superfluid and the normal-fluid component caused implicitly by the motion of vortex lines and calculate the Vinen coefficients B and B'.