Kinetics of nucleation during the bcc-hcp structural transition in solid helium

The nucleation kinetics of the hcp phase in the supercooled bcc phase of solid 4He and a 3He-4He solution containing 1% 3He is studied experimentally. Precision measurements of the pressure in the crystal are made as it is cooled along an isochore near the bcc-hcp phase equilibrium curve. The lifetime of the metastable bcc phase in 4He is found to have a complicated dependence on the level of supercooling which can be described in terms of two nucleation mechanisms—homogeneous and heterogeneous. The homogeneous mechanism occurs for the highly supercooled bcc phase in carefully annealed crystals, while the heterogeneous mechanism, for which the activation coefficients are several orders of magnitude lower than for the homogeneous mechanism, occurs with low supercooling. The influence of defects and impurities on the nucleation process is also studied. In unannealed (defective) 4He crystals the nucleation rate is found to have an enormous scatter, which is indicative of poor reproducibility from one crystal to another. For annealed samples of 3He-4He solution the nucleation kinetics data can be described only by the heterogeneous nucleation mechanism.