Abstract
Liquid helium wets almost all surfaces. This behaviour results from its small dielectric permittivity, ε = 1.057, which leads to attractive forces between the helium atoms weaker than those between helium and other atoms [1]. In 1991 Cheng et al., however, predicted that 4He does not wet certain alkali metals. Instead, for some of these metallic substrates, a first-order wetting transition was foreseen [2]. In the alkali metals, weakly bound outer electrons cause a shortrange repulsion for the helium atoms. The resulting temperature-dependent balance between repulsive short-range and attractive long-range forces is at the origin of the wetting phenomenon in liquid helium.
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Blossey, R. (2001). Vortices in Metastable 4He Films. In: Barenghi, C.F., Donnelly, R.J., Vinen, W.F. (eds) Quantized Vortex Dynamics and Superfluid Turbulence. Lecture Notes in Physics, vol 571. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45542-6_41
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45542-6_41
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