Superfluid He-4 Dynamics Beyond Quasiparticle Excitations

The dynamics of superfluid He-4 at and above the Landau quasiparticle regime is investigated by high-precision inelastic neutron scattering measurements of the dynamic structure factor. A highly structured response is observed above the familiar phonon-maxon-roton spectrum, characterized by sharp thresholds for phonon-phonon, maxon-roton, and roton-roton coupling processes. The experimental dynamic structure factor is compared to the calculation of the same physical quantity by a dynamic many-body theory including three-phonon processes self-consistently. The theory is found to provide a quantitative description of the dynamics of the correlated bosons for energies up to about three times that of the Landau quasiparticles.