Thermal convection and nonlinear effects of a superfluid3He-4He mixture in a porous medium

Abstract

The convective instability of superfluid3He-4He mixtures in porous media is investigated. The general hydrodynamic equations are derived and reduced to a single nonlinear equation for a scalar field. The superfluid mixtures in a porous medium have a constant4He chemical potential and behave essentially like a classical fluid in a porous medium. Two-fluid effects are calculated both at the onset of steady convection and the subsequent boundary of instability. The shift of critical Rayleigh number is about 1% or less at the onset of convection, but can be as large as 20% or more at the instability boundary for some regions aroundT ≈ 1 K. This two-fluid shift is quite large compared to the corresponding 0.001% shift at the onset of convection for bulk superfluid3He-4He mixtures.