The spectacular properties of liquid helium at low temperature are generally accepted as the signature of the bosonic nature of this system. Particularly the superfluid phase is identified with a Bose–Einstein condensed fluid. However, the relationship between the superfluidity and the Bose–Einstein condensation is still largely unknown. Studying a perturbed liquid 4 He system would provide information on the relationship between the two phenomena. Liquid 4 He confined in porous media provides an excellent example of a boson system submitted to disorder and finite-size effects. Much care should be paid to the sample preparation, particularly the confining condition should be defined quantitatively. To achieve homogeneous confinement conditions, firstly a suitable porous sample should be selected, the experiments should then be conducted at a lower pressure than the saturated vapor pressure of bulk helium. Several interesting effects have been shown in confined 4 He samples prepared as described above. Particularly we report the observation of the separation of the superfluid-normal fluid transition temperature, T c , from the temperature at which the Bose–Einstein condensation is believed to start, T BEC , the existence of metastable densities for the confined liquid accessible to the bulk system as a short-lived metastable state only and strong clues for a finite lifetime of the elementary excitations at temperatures as low as 0.4 K .
Finite-size effects on the Bose–Einstein condensation critical temperature in a harmonic trap
