Cavitation generated by vibrating quartz tuning fork in concentrated 3He–4He mixture

Abstract

The state of the problem of cavitation in superfluid helium and the content of previous works on this topic are analyzed. The transition between turbulent flow and cavitation under oscillations of a quartz tuning fork in a normal and superfluid isotopic mixture containing 15% of 3He in the temperature range of 0.5–3 K is studied experimentally. The temperature dependences of the critical velocity for the cavitation onset and the critical transition excitation force are obtained. We compare the results of our measurements with the data obtained by other groups. The results of measurements with tuning forks in restricted and unrestricted geometries suggest that the presence of acoustic emission facilitates the conditions for the onset of cavitation and indirectly confirms the role of vortex lines. A comparison of the temperature dependences of the critical velocity of cavitation onset in pure 4He and a concentrated 3He–4He mixture did not give an unambiguous answer to the reason for the sharp increase of this velocity, at the transition to the superfluid state, and the contributions of both thermal effects and the 3He impurities to the velocity increase.