Electrons and cavitation in liquid helium

Cavitation of Electron Bubbles in Liquid Helium Below Saturation Pressure

“…20 that we and other authors have used in the past. 8,9,13,21 We want to mention that the value of Roche et al 19 agrees well with that of Guo et al 22 obtained long time ago. When P ≥ 0, Eq.…”

“…We will show that for electron bubbles, the critical pressure P cr at which it happens is very close to P u , a result already obtained in Ref. 9. As a general rule, the presence of impurities in the liquid results in a sizeable decrease of |P cr |.…”

“…21 This value of P sp is consistent with the value obtained by other authors. 9,23,24 A necessary condition for the validity of the capillary model is that the metastable electron bubble has a fairly large radius. Only in this case one may split the system into a volume and a surface region which justifies the use of Eq.…”

“…3,5,6 Heterogeneous cavitation produced by impurities purposely introduced in the liquid is also interesting by itself, 7 and in a series of recent experiments the case of heterogeneous cavitation caused by electrons (electron bubble explosions) has been addressed in detail. 8,9,10 Another interesting case of heterogeneous cavitation in liquid 4 He thoroughly studied is that caused by the presence of quantized vortices acting as cavitation seeds. 11,12,13 In this work we attempt a theoretical description of electron bubble explosions using a T -dependent density functional approach we have employed in a series of studies on cavitation and nucleation in liquid helium (see Ref. 14 for a comprehensive review) in conjunction with a realistic electron-helium (e-He) effective potential.…”

Electron mobility in liquid and supercritical helium measured using corona discharges: a new semi-empirical model for cavity formation

“…Low temperatures assist the localisation process which is reflected by a shift in the mobility transition region to higher densities with increasing temperature. 5 Cavity formation around electrons in LHe has been studied extensively using various methods 12,13 including density function theory (DFT). [14][15][16][17] DFT methods specially developed for LHe provide good agreement with first principles methods for small helium clusters, 18 but have the disadvantage that they are restricted to zero Kelvin.…”