1308.0556 (Philip W Anderson)

The Dilemma of Bose Solids: is He Supersolid?    [PDF]

Philip W Anderson

Nearly a decade ago the old controversy about possible superfluid flow in the ground state of solid He4 was revived by the apparent experimental observation of such superflow. Although the experimentalists have recently retracted, very publicly, some of the observations on which such a claim was based, other confirming observations of which there is no reason for doubt remain on the record. Meanwhile theoretical arguments bolstered by some experimental evidence strongly favor the existence of supersolidity in the Bose-Hubbard model, and these arguments would seem to extend to solid He. The true situation thus is apparently extraordinarily opaque. The situation is complicated by the fact that all accurate simulation studies on Heuse the uniform sign hypothesis which confines them to the phase-coherent state, which is, in principle, supersolid, so that no accurate simulations of the true, classical solid exist. There is great confusion as to the nature of the ground state wave-function for a bose quantum solid, and we suggest that until that question is cleared up none of these dilemmas will be resolved.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.0556