Public Release:  Researchers map quantum vortices inside superfluid helium nanodroplets

First ever snapshots of spinning nanodroplets reveal surprising features

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory


IMAGE: This is Oliver Gessner of the Chemical Sciences Division, Berkeley Lab. view more

Credit: Roy Kaltschmidt


"The observation of quantum vortices is one of the most clear and unique demonstrations of the quantum properties of these microscopic objects," says Oliver Gessner, senior scientist in the Chemical Sciences Division at Berkeley Lab. Gessner and colleagues, Andrey Vilesov of the University of Southern California and Christoph Bostedt of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford, led the multi-facility and multi-university team that published the work this week in Science.

The finding could have implications for other liquid or gas systems that contain vortices, says USC's Vilesov. "The quest for quantum vortices in superfluid droplets has stretched for decades," he says. "But this is the first time they have been seen in superfluid droplets."



For decades, researchers have known that when superfluid helium is rotated--in a little spinning bucket, say--the rotation produces quantum vortices, swirls that are regularly spaced throughout the liquid. But the question remained whether anyone could see this behavior in an isolated, nanoscale droplet. If the swirls were there, it would confirm that helium nanodroplets, which can range in size from tens of nanometers to microns, are indeed superfluid throughout and that the motion of the entire liquid drop is that of a single quantum object rather than a mixture of independent particles.

But measuring liquid flow in helium nanodroplets has proven to be a serious challenge. "The way these droplets are made is by passing helium through a tiny nozzle that is cryogenically cooled down to below 10 Kelvin," says Gessner. "Then, the nanoscale droplets shoot through a vacuum chamber at almost 200 meters-per-second. They live once for a few milliseconds while traversing the experimental chamber and then they're gone. How do you show that these objects, which are all different from one another, have quantum vortices inside?"


"With the new x-ray free electron laser, we can now image phenomenon and look at processes far beyond what we could imagine just a decade ago," says Bostedt of SLAC. "Looking at the droplets gave us a beautiful glimpse into the quantum world. It really opens the door to fascinating sciences."


The diffraction patterns immediately revealed that the shape of many droplets were not spheres, as was previously assumed. Instead, they were oblate. Just as the Earth's rotation causes it to bulge at the equator, so too do rotating nanodroplets expand around the middle and flatten at the top and bottom.




Moreover, while normal liquid drops will change shape as they spin faster and faster--to resemble a peanut or multi-lobed globule, for instance--the researchers saw no evidence of such shapeshifting in the helium nanodroplets. "Essentially, we're exploring a new regime of quantum rotation with this matter," Gessner says.

"It's a new kind of matter in a sense because it is a self-contained isolated superfluid," he adds. "It's just all by itself, held together by its own surface tension. It's pretty perfect to study these systems if one wants to understand superfluidity and isolate it as much as possible."




