Roton excitation in overpressurized superfluid He-4

Abstract

We carry out a theoretical investigation of overpressurized superfluid phases of He-4 by means of quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) simulations. As a function of density, we study structural and superfluid properties, and estimate the energy of the roton excitation by inverting imaginary-time density correlation functions computed by QMC, using Maximum Entropy. We estimate the pressure at which the roton energy vanishes to be about 100 bars, which we identify with the spinodal density, i.e., the upper limit for the existence of a metastable superfluid phase.