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Chiral domain and macroscopic orbital supercurrent along chiral domain wall in chiral superfluid He3

Y. Ikegai1, Y. Hino1, B. Tang1, Z. Xu1, T. Takagi2, and Y. Sasaki1,*

  • 1Department of Physics, Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University, Kitashirakawa-Oiwake-Cho, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8502, Japan
  • 2Department of Applied Physics, University of Fukui, Bunkyo 3-9-1, Fukui 910-8507, Japan

  • *Contact author: sasaki@scphys.kyoto-u.ac.jp
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Phys. Rev. Research 7, 033254 – Published 15 September, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/bvhd-zj7j

Abstract

Chiral superfluid He−A3 contained in narrow-gapped parallel plate cell with in-plane external magnetic field is expected to form uniformly aligned texture of chiral vectors, which denote the direction of Cooper pair angular momentum. In the real experimental situation, we often observe the existence of a few millimeter sized chiral domains and chiral domain walls in between them. A persistent orbital supercurrent is expected to flow along the wall. We have succeeded in tilting chiral domain walls by applying external supercurrent, which interacts with the orbital supercurrent. This observation confirmed the existence of macroscopic orbital supercurrent along the chiral domain wall. The tilting angle depends on the direction and magnitude of the external supercurrent as well as the direction of the chiral vector in adjacent chiral domains. This allowed us to determine the direction of the chiral vector in each chiral domain. The measured tilting angle also suggests that the magnitude of macroscopic angular momentum of each chiral domain is as large as the ground-state angular momentum ℏ times a number of He3 particles divided by 2.

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Phys. Rev. Research 7, 033254– Published 15 September, 2025
  • Received 8 October 2024
  • Accepted 31 July 2025
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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