Shear modulus of solid helium-4 confined in a 10 μm gap

To investigate the elastic properties of solid 4He at low temperatures, the shear modulus of solid 4He confined in a narrow gap, comparable to the length of the dislocation network of solid 4He was measured. Two sets of parallel plate transducers were prepared. One set has a narrow gap of 11 μm and the other has a 290 μm gap as a reference of the bulk solid measurement. The temperature and strain dependences of the shear modulus were measured for solid 4He in both cases. The increase of the shear modulus from 200 mK down to 14 mK was found to be smaller by 0.3 in the narrow-gap solid compared with the case of the bulk solid. By measuring the strain dependence of the shear modulus, the stress required to unbind 3He in the narrow-gap solid was an order of magnitude larger than that in the bulk solid. These gap dependences can be related to the dislocation-network difference between two solids. The maximum length of the dislocation segment in the narrow-gap solid 4He was found to be shorter than 6 μm, which was one order of magnitude smaller than that in the bulk. The difference of the network distribution is considered to originate in the difference of the crystal quality which is caused by the confinement effect in the slab geometry.