Thermal resistance at a solid/superfluid helium interface

Ramière, Aymeric
Volz, Sebastian
Amrit, Jay

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Publication date

April 2016

DOI

10.1038/nmat4574

Publisher

Nature Publishing Group

Abstract

International audienceKapitza in 1941 discovered that heat flowing across a solid in contact with superfluid helium (<2 K) encounters a strong thermal resistance at the interface. Khalatnikov demonstrated theoretically that this constitutes a general phenomenon related to all interfaces at all temperatures, given the dependence of heat transmission on the acoustic impedance (sound velocity × density) of each medium. For the solid/superfluid interface, the measured transmission of heat is almost one hundred times stronger than the Khalatnikov prediction. This discrepancy could be intuitively attributed to diffuse scattering of phonons at the interface but, despite several attempts a detailed quantitative comparison between theoretical and ...