Cool things happen when you cool liquid helium to 2.2 K. Below this temperature (lambda point), superfluidity takes over and viscosity decreases radically, resulting in a frictionless flow. Place it in a container and it will flow into
Cool things happen when you cool liquid helium to 2.2 K. Below this temperature (lambda point), superfluidity takes over and viscosity decreases radically, resulting in a frictionless flow. Place it in a container and it will flow into a thin film up around its edges and flow through the pores of the walls. This anomaly is difficult to understand using classical fluid mechanics; Poiseuille's law dictates that the flow rate of a fluid corresponds to the difference across the capillary and to the fourth power of the capillary radius. But below the lambda point, the flow rate of supercooled liquid helium was not only high, it was both independent of both the capillary radius and pressure; evidently, this is not within the explanatory scope of classical theory. When cooling liquid helium (by pumping out its vapour), the liquid ceases to boil due to fact that the thermal conductivity of liquid helium has so sharply increases to maintain a homogeneous temperature. Let's start our exploration from the ground up: the reason liquid helium never solidifies no matter how cold you cool it is because the weak Van der Waals forces between the atoms are adequate enough to overpower the zero-point motion related with attempting to restrain a helium atom to a site on the lattice. The nature of the superfluid is therefore necessarily quantum mechanical. London suggested superfluidity as an expression of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) but the i