Plateau in the temperature dependence of the thermal conductivity of solid hydrogen containing heavy isotopic neon impurities at ultimately low concentrations

Abstract

The thermal conductivity of solid hydrogen with 0.0001–0.0002 at. % Ne in the form of equilibrium samples grown at a low rate after remelting is investigated in the temperature range 1.5–10.0 K. It is demonstrated that the temperature dependence of the thermal conductivity for the samples containing neon at concentrations considerably lower than the limiting solubility of the heavy impurity exhibits a symmetric plateau. This behavior of the temperature dependence of the thermal conductivity differs qualitatively from the previously observed resonance minimum in the temperature dependence of the thermal conductivity for desublimated samples. A relaxation model is proposed for explaining the observed effect. According to this model, the plateau is explained by the formation of linear impurity structures that are located along dislocation lines and considerably enhance phonon scattering by dislocation cores. The density of linear impurity structures is estimated. The influence of these structures on the thermal conductivity is compared with the corresponding effect of uniformly distributed individual neon atoms in solid hydrogen.