sizes, we only need to know a few concepts to tell the story of He II.
The first is quantization. This means that for particles—atoms,
nuclei, electrons, protons, neutrons and so on—physical parameters
such as energy or momentum are not continuous. As an example, the
electrons in an atom cannot possess any amount of energy but instead
can only occupy certain distinct (quantized) energy levels. More
generally, we speak of quantum states, which are a set of physical
parameters that describe the condition of the particle at a given
moment. It is the existence of these quantized states and the transition
of particles such as electrons between these states that underlies
technology such as semiconductors.
1
The next concept is the distinction between fermions and bosons,
which is related to the quantum property of spin – a description of
angular momentum. Fermions are particles whose spin is quantized in
half integers (1/2, 3/2…) while the spins of bosons are quantized in full
integers (0,1,2,3…). Examples of fermions include electrons, protons
and nuclei with odd mass numbers, and examples of bosons include the
Higgs boson and nuclei with even mass numbers. Significantl y, the most
common isotope of helium,
4
He, is a boson.
A key difference between fermions and bosons is that a single
energy level (or quantum state) of a quantum system can contain only
one fermion—this is known as the Pauli exclusion principle—while
there is no restriction to how many bosons you can have at a given
quantum energy level. Einstein and others recognized that it was, in
theory, possible for a large number of bosons in a system to drop into
the lowest energy (or ground) quantum state. This effect is known as
Bose–Einstein condensation and prior to the discovery of He II had
never been observed experimentally.
With this background, we now go to Fritz London and Laszlo Tisza
in Paris in 1937. Both London and Tisza were refugees. Laszlo Tisza
was a Hungarian physicist who had previously been working at the
Ukrainian Physico-Technical Institute with Lev Landau, about whom we
will hear more later. Tisza was a member of the Communist Party, but
Stalin’s purges had made him lose faith in the party, and he left the
USSR for Paris. Before leaving the USSR, however, Tisza had begun to
develop a theory of liquid helium. Fritz London, also a theoretical
physicist, was the brother of Heinz London (Chap. 3) and, along with