Liquid-vapor critical behavior in silica aerogel

Fluids in porous media provide a testing ground for the effects of disorder and confinement on phase transitions and critical phenomena. Specifically, highly porous silica aerogel with its tenuous solid structure has allowed low temperature physicists to probe the effect of dilute fixed impurities on both the 4He superfluid transition and the 3He superfluid transition. Both systems have yielded exciting results and work is ongoing, especially on 3He in aerogel.; This thesis explores the effect of aerogel on another transition---the liquid-vapor transition near the liquid-vapor critical point. In dense porous media, the liquid-vapor transition is usually described as capillary condensation---a process which assigns surface tension a primary role in determining the thermodynamic state of the system. However, aerogels are often so diffuse (less than 5% silica by volume---the rest is open space) that it becomes difficult to speak of pore size and meniscus shape as one would in a denser porous medium. As one approaches the liquid-vapor critical point, thermal fluctuations within the fluid grow until they exceed the scale of the aerogel strands and pores themselves. In this regime one cannot expect surface tension to control the thermodynamics of the system---it is instead in a regime where thermal fluctuations may govern its behavior. In the past there were even suggestions that the addition of aerogel might shift the character of the transition into another universality class.; The following chapters present data collected on helium and neon in aerogel near their respective liquid-vapor critical points. While the behavior of the fluid at low temperatures is consistent with the pictures provided by capillary condensation, closer to the critical point they are incompatible and remain somewhat unexplained. Evidence for a shift in universality class was not found---in fact there was very little evidence for a macroscopic equilibrium transition of any type.