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Science 1 May 2009:
Vol. 324. no. 5927, pp. 631 - 632
DOI: 10.1126/science.1169456
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Reports

A Gross-Pitaevskii Treatment for Supersolid Helium

Philip W. Anderson

Understanding the observations of nonlinear rotational susceptibility in samples of solid helium below temperatures of 1 to 200 millikelvin (mK) has been a subject of some controversy. Here, the observations are conjectured to be describable in terms of a rarified Gross-Pitaevskii superfluid of vacancies, with a transition temperature of about 50 mK, whose density is locally enhanced by crystal imperfections. The observations can be greatly affected by this density enhancement. I argue that every pure Bose solid’s ground state is a supersolid.

Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08525, USA.

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THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
A Glassy State of Supersolid Helium.
J. Saunders (2009)
Science 324, 601-602
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