SIGNIFICANT EVENTS - FUTURE FLIGHT PROGRAM
07/14/00

Miste PI Describes Crossover Behavior of the Heat Capacity and Susceptibility near the ³He Critical Point

Marty Barmatz of JPL, MISTE Principal Investigator, presented an invited paper titled "Thermodynamic Measurements near the Liquid-Gas Critical Point of ³He" at the 2000 International Symposium on Quantum Fluids and Solids. This talk, co-authored by Inseob Hahn, F. Zhong, M. A. Anisimov and V. A. Agayan, was part of a Microgravity session. The talk described the objectives of the MISTE flight experiment now being developed to fly in the Low Temperature Microgravity Physics Facility (LTMPF) on the International Space Station. The MISTE flight experiment plans to perform measurements in the asymptotic region very near the critical point. Recent ground-based measurements of the heat capacity and isothermal susceptibility, obtained along the critical isochore in the crossover region farther away from the critical point, were also presented. These measurements were analyzed using a new parametric crossover equation of state and a field theoretical renormalization group calculation based on a f4 model. Both models provided a good fit to these data. A paper was submitted to the QFS 2000 Proceedings that will be published in the Journal of Low Temperature Physics.