Usage of superfluids

[CupOfWater]

What can we use superfluids for?
I suppose it's got some kind of use since it have no friction...

 

[GoodKat]

Never hard of this, could it be used as a lubricant? I'm always looking for something new to grease the slide of my Beretta with.

 

[CupOfWater]

Never hard of this, could it be used as a lubricant? I'm always looking for something new to grease the slide of my Beretta with.

Haha, sorry to dissapoint you, but no, you can't use it as a lubricant for your baretta.
It's almost 0 K.

 

[GoodKat]

Haha, sorry to dissapoint you, but no, you can't use it as a lubricant for your baretta.
It's almost 0 K.

Curses! I'll have to stick to the usual Teflon particle suspension.

 

[CupOfWater]

You americans with your crazy gun laws

 

[GoodKat]

You americans with your crazy gun laws

As much as I love my guns, our gun laws are bullcrap. Everyone here is on one of two sides, either "everyone should have whatever guns they want" or "no one should have any guns". You would have a hard time finding a single gun law here that is actually meant to keep guns away from criminals.

 

[Spase]

As much as I love my guns, our gun laws are bullcrap. Everyone here is on one of two sides, either "everyone should have whatever guns they want" or "no one should have any guns". You would have a hard time finding a single gun law here that is actually meant to keep guns away from criminals.

I agree with your sentiments. And now to steer things further off topic: I was actually surprised that folks with felonies on their record are not allowed to buy rifles and shotguns. The trouble of course is it still doesn't keep guns out of the hands of anyone who's still committing crimes.

Back on topic:

Yeah... Superfluids are... very strange. As someone with only basic knowledge of them I have to wonder if there's really an application to use them as lubricants both because you have to maintain such a low temp but also because they have the ability to seep through things... like glass.

:shock:

 

[Ozymandyus]

Can they seep through glass? It would have to be especially porous glass... it can 'climb out' of glass through the Onnes effect though.

I think the main applications will be scientific in nature, for high precision devices that need to be unaffected by friction and such. High calibration gyroscopes that use superfluids already exist I believe.

 

[Spase]

If I remember right it seeped right through regular borosilicate glassware. I could be mistaken or it could be bad information but that's what I remember. It came from some old school documentary clip on youtube.

 

[CupOfWater]

I just remembered, they use superfluid helium to cool down the superconducting elements in the magnets over at CERN.

 

[Josan]

I just remembered, they use superfluid helium to cool down the superconducting elements in the magnets over at CERN.

Yes they do, but does it have to be superfluid? Obviously they are using it to cool down the magnets so that they are super-conducting, but is there any reason for using a superfluid liquid?

 

[Ozymandyus]

If I remember right it seeped right through regular borosilicate glassware. I could be mistaken or it could be bad information but that's what I remember. It came from some old school documentary clip on youtube.

Ah yeah, you are probably talking about the one that shows them leaking through the ceramic bottomed glassware that has very small pores. A superfluid cannot get through regular glassware.

 

[CupOfWater]

Yes they do, but does it have to be superfluid? Obviously they are using it to cool down the magnets so that they are super-conducting, but is there any reason for using a superfluid liquid?

I think it's a coincidense. They need the magnets super-cool, and liquid helium simply is superfluid at those temperatures.

 

[Netheralian]

Rather than speculating, I looked it up on Wikipedia!

Applications

Recently in the field of chemistry, superfluid helium-4 has been successfully used in spectroscopic techniques as a quantum solvent. Referred to as Superfluid Helium Droplet Spectroscopy (SHeDS), it is of great interest in studies of gas molecules, as a single molecule solvated in a superfluid medium allows a molecule to have effective rotational freedom, allowing it to behave exactly as it would in the "gas" phase.

Superfluids are also used in high-precision devices such as gyroscopes, which allow the measurement of some theoretically predicted gravitational effects (for an example see the Gravity Probe B article).

Recently, one type of superfluid has been used to trap light and slow its speed greatly. In an experiment performed by Lene Hau, light was passed through a Bose-Einstein condensed gas of sodium (analogous to a superfluid) and found to be slowed to 17 metres per second from its normal speed of 299,792,458 metres per second in vacuum.[3] This does not change the absolute value of c, nor is it completely new: any medium other than vacuum, such as water or glass, also slows down the propagation of light to c/n where n is the material's refractive index. The very slow speed of light and high refractive index observed in this particular experiment, moreover, is not a general property of all superfluids.

The Infrared Astronomical Satellite IRAS, launched in January 1983 to gather infrared data was cooled by 720 litres of superfluid helium, maintaining a temperature of 1.6 K (-271.4 ,­,°C).

I have "worked" with Helium 3 & 4 before (in a conceptual design sense) for "sorbption" cryocoolers. These cryogentic coolers operate down to 0.5-10 K range. I can't remember why but you can get helium 3 much cooler (well - 1-2 K or so) than helium 4. Can't say I ever noticed they were superfluids! You learn something new everyday...