title: Specific heat of helium confined to a 57- &mgr;m planar geometry near the lambda point
abstract: We report measurements of the specific heat of liquid helium confined to 57-&mgr;m planar gaps extending to within a few nanokelvin of the bulk lambda transition. The data are in fair agreement with Monte Carlo estimates for finite-size effects and with renormalization-group-theory predictions above the transition. Far from the transition, we find surface specific heat exponents, alpha(s) = 0.64+/-0.05 below, and 0.65+/-0.2 above, which compare well with the prediction of 0.658. Comparison with other recent data on small length scales shows some areas of agreement.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA.
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Lipa
authors.initials: DR
authors.lastname: Swanson
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Nissen
authors.initials: ZK
authors.lastname: Geng
authors.initials: PR
authors.lastname: Williamson
authors.initials: DA
authors.lastname: Stricker
authors.initials: TC
authors.lastname: Chui
authors.initials: UE
authors.lastname: Israelsson
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Larson