BACK TO HOME Rafael Garcia, Researcher. As you can guess from browsing the contents of this page, my research is studying phase transitions. Things that arouse my imagination generally include thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, superfluidity, friction, critical phenomena and fluctuations. People in physics tend to know me for studying critical Casimir forces, a new thermodynamic phenomenon associated with the confinement of critical fluctuations. The superfluid phase transition is a kind of Bose-Einstein condensation where there are strong interactions between the atoms.
Critical fluctuations are intense fluctuations in the order or symmetry of a thermodynamic system.
In an adsorbed film, the spatial extent of these fluctuations cannot exceed the film thickness, giving rise to a number of observable finite-size effects, including the famous critical Casimir force . To the right are shown some of our intriguing measurements of the thickness of helium films near 2.18K. With these measurements we were able to demonstrate that, without a doubt, critical Casimir forces exist in helium films near the superfluid transition temperature. Moses Chan and I have found recently that these finite-size effects in films give us an important tool for studying these phase transitions. This page and its contents are copyright by Rafael Garcia.