The Superfluid Glass Phase of 3He-A

Abstract

It is established theoretically that an ordered state with continuous symmetry is inherently unstable to arbitrarily small amounts of disorder [1, 2]. This principle is of central importance in a wide variety of condensed systems including superconducting vortices [3, 4], Ising spin models [5] and their dynamics [6], and liquid crystals in porous media [7, 8], where some degree of disorder is ubiquitous, although its experimental observation has been elusive. Based on these ideas it was predicted [9] that 3He in high porosity aerogel would become a superfluid glass. We report here our nuclear magnetic resonance measurements on 3He in aerogel demonstrating destruction of long range orientational order of the intrinsic superfluid orbital angular momentum, confirming the existence of a superfluid glass. In contrast, 3He-A generated by warming from superfluid 3He-B has perfect long-range orientational order providing a mechanism for switching off this effect.