Micrometer-sized droplets from liquid helium jets at low stagnation pressures

Abstract

Droplets and droplet beams produced from the breakup of micrometer-sized liquid helium jets in vacuum were studied in this work, advancing into previously unexplored regimes of low stagnation pressures. Using a 5 μm orifice, the droplet beam shows surprisingly diverse characteristics at increasing nozzle pressures from 0.6 to 100 bar: a well-collimated beam at low stagnation pressures, a spray at some intermediate values, and a less-collimated beam at high pressures. Focusing on a nozzle stagnation of 0.6 bar and 2.7 K, we highlight the spectrum of jet disturbances, resulting in different droplet beam behaviors. On some occasions, we observed uniformly sized and equidistant droplets with diameters ranging from 11 up to more than 25 μm and separations from 15 to 100 μm. From simple estimates using the ratio between the droplet separations and diameters, we determined the disturbance frequencies benchmarking the production of repeatable targets for future experiments with superfluid helium droplets. Further analysis of the droplet beam behavior at farther distances from the nozzle revealed that the droplet diameter grew downstream up to 22 μm from an initial value of 13 μm, while their aspect ratio decreased from 1.33 to 1.16. These results indicate that droplet coagulation and superfluidity both influence the droplet beam up to several hundreds of millimeters after the nozzle exit.