VORTEX RINGS AND THE SUPERFLUID LAMBDA-TRANSITION

A vortex-ring formulation of the 4He lambda-transition provides a clear physical picture of the superfluid transition. The thermally excited rings are dipoles which orient in an applied flow field, and their net backflow cancels part of the applied flow, reducing the superfluid density. At the lambda-point rings of infinite size drive the superfluid density to zero as a power law of the reduced temperature, with an exponent of 0.672. By fitting to the experimental superfluid amplitude the core energy of the smallest rings is found to be 6.1 K at T(lambda), and thier diameter is 2.3 angstrom. It is proposed that these can be identified as the roton excitations of the Landau model. The vortex theory also yields new insights into topics such as boundary effects at a wall, finite-size effects, and the dynamics of the transition.