Superfluidity of vacancies in solid 4He

Abstract

Under the adiabatic approximation, we present a superfluid state of vacancy motion in solid 4He. The vacancies in solid 4He can sense an attractive effective interaction by exchange of virtual longitudinal acoustic phonons. Such an interaction leads to a Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) condensation state, in which the vacancies with opposite wave vectors are bound into pairs and single, unpaired bare vacancies are transformed into a new kind of quasiparticle, the dressed vacancy. A dressed vacancy is a vacancy clothed with a cloud of virtual longitudinal-acoustic phonons. The vacancy system undergoes a first-order phase transition from the normal state to the BCS condensation state. The critical temperature may be the transition temperature of the supersolid state. We derive the low-temperature expressions of vacancy heat capacity and vacancy number density in the BCS condensation state. The BCS condensation state of vacancies is the superfluid state of vacancies, which possesses potentially important and novel effects in condensed matter physics.