Superconductivity – Understanding Superfluidity and Superconductivity

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Superfluidity and superconductivity?

Is there any relation between the two aside from the fact that they are somewhat analogies , I see a lot of people on the internet who claim the helium (in it's superfluid state) is a also a super conductor but searching this site and Wikipedia I couldn't find anything speaking directly of this although I found statements like this "liquid helium is used to cool the superconducting material …." which suggest the opposite .

-update: "Josephson effect has also been observed in SHeQUIDs, the superfluid Helium analog of a dc-SQUID" in case SHeQUIDs isn't a superconductor how could this be?

Best Answer

Both of them are super-interesting to study:-)

Superfluid is a low-temperature state of a quantum many-body system of electrically neutral particles (e.g. atoms). Superfluids have some amazing properties. For example, there is no dissipation (i.e. friction) and the flow is irrotational (up to quantum vortices). Theoretically it is described by a macroscopic wave-function with its absolute value related to the superfluid density and the gradient of its phase defines the superfluid velocity. In addition, in every superfluid there is also a physical Goldstone mode which costs nothing to excite.

Superconductor is like a superfluid, but the elementary particles are electrically charged (e.g. electrons). This leads to the Meissner effect, i.e. it costs energy for the magnetic field to penetrate into a superconductor. There is also no physical soft mode in the energy spectrum. Theoretically all this is explained by the Higgs mechanism.

In both cases the lowest energy quantum state is macroscopically populated which is know as Bose-Einstein condensation.

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