Search

Impurity-helium solids (Im-He solids) are porous solids created by injecting a beam of mixed helium and impurity gases into superfluid ⁴He. In this work we use electron spin resonance (ESR) techniques to investigate Im-He solids containing atoms and molecules of hydrogen and/or deuterium. We have performed studies of low temperature (T ~ 1.35 K) tunnelling chemical reactions in which deuterium atoms replace the hydrogen atoms bound in H₂ or HD molecules to produce large (up to 7.5×10¹⁷cm⁻³) and relatively stable concentrations of free hydrogen atoms. The time dependence of H and D atom concentrations has been investigated for Im-He samples with different initial ratios of hydrogen and deuterium ranging from 1:20 to 1:1.The satellite ESR lines associated with the dipolar coupling of electron spins of H and D atoms to the nuclear moments of the hydrogen nuclei found in neighboring molecules have been observed in Im-He solids. The forbidden hyperfine transition of atomic hydrogen involving the mutual spin flips of electrons and protons has also been observed.

The Low Temperature Microgravity Physics Facility currently in the design phase is a multiple user and multiple flight facility intended to provide a long duration low temperature environment onboard the International Space Station. The Facility will provide a unique platform for scientific investigations requiring both low temperature and microgravity conditions. It will be attached to the Japanese Experiment Module`s Exposed Facility and can house two science instruments each flight. The Facility consists of a 180-liter superfluid helium dewar, a support enclosure, and control electronics. The facility will be launched full of cryogen, and retrieved after the cryogen is depleted. Industrial partners are responsible for building the reusable facility and standard parts of the instruments. Principal Investigators from universities and other institutions are contracted to develop major parts of the science instrument package. An overview of the detailed technical capabilities of the facility will be presented in this paper.

The thermal conductivity of solid parahydrogen crystal with methane admixtures has been measured in the temperature range 1.5 to 8 K. Solid samples were grown from the gas mixture at 13 K. Concentration of CH4 admixture molecules in the gas varied form 5 to 570 ppm. A very broad maximum of thermal conductivity with absolute value of about 110 W/(m K) is observed at 2.6 K. The data are interpreted by Callaway model considering phonons resonant scattering on quasi-local vibrations of CH4 molecules, phonon-grain boundary and phonon-phonon scattering processes. The increase of grain boundary scattering leads to the decrease of the maximum broadening. The analysis shows that the solid mixture of p-H2 and CH4 is a heterogeneous solution for CH4 concentration higher than 0.1 ppm., 9 pages. to be published in LTP (2003)