Abstract
FOLLOWING the proposal of London1 that the peculiar transition in liquid helium may be due to the accumulation of a significant fraction of the total number of particles in the ground-state of a Bose–Einstein gaseous assembly, many attempts have been made to understand the behaviour of this liquid in terms of the quantum statistics of a Bose gas. Most of these investigations have been confined to the study of helium in bulk. A few years ago, Osborne2 applied Bose–Einstein statistics to helium films and showed that for films thicker than about 10−7cm., the transition temperature should be the same as that for bulk liquid, whereas films thinner than this are effectively two-dimensional and should have transition temperatures much lower than the bulk value. The monotonic lowering of the ‘onset’ temperature of superfluidity with decreasing film thickness, observed in the study of unsaturated helium films3 (which are essentially three-dimensional), thus remained unexplained4.
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References
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SINGH, A., PATHRIA, R. Bose–Einstein Statistics and Helium Films. Nature 183, 668 (1959). https://doi.org/10.1038/183668a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/183668a0
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