Flow instability in 3He-A as analog of generation of hypermagnetic field in early Universe

Abstract

It is now well-recognized that the Universe may behave like a condensed matter system in which several phase transitions have taken place. Superconductors and the superfluid phases of 3He are condensed matter systems with useful similarities to the Universe: they both contain Bose fields (order parameter) and Fermions (quasiparticles) which interact in a way similar to the interaction of Higgs and gauge particles with fermions in particle physics. This analogy allows us to simulate many properties of the cosmologically relevant physical (particle physics) vacuum in condensed matter, while direct experiments in particle physics are still far from realization. Recently, the anomalous generation of momentum (called ``momentogenesis'') was experimentally confirmed in 3He: in the non-trivial background of a moving 3He vortex, quantum effects gave rise to the production of quasiparticles with momentum which were detected by measuring the force on the vortex. This phenomenon is based on the same physics as the anomalous generation of matter in particle physics and bears directly on the cosmological problem of why the Universe contains much more matter than antimatter (``baryogenesis''). Here we report the experimental observation of the effect opposite to momentogenesis: the conversion of quasiparticle momentum into a non-trivial order parameter configuration or ``texture''. The corresponding process in a cosmological setting would be the creation of a primordial magnetic field due to changes in the matter content.