Can warmer than room temperature electrons levitate above a liquid helium surface ?

TL;DR

This study investigates whether electrons on liquid helium can be heated to temperatures significantly above the helium bath and examines the mechanisms behind their overheating, using experimental data and Poisson-Boltzmann modeling.

Contribution

It provides a method to distinguish thermal from non-thermal electron redistribution mechanisms under cyclotron resonance on liquid helium.

Findings

Experimental results align with Poisson-Boltzmann predictions.

Deviations suggest other physical mechanisms influence electron heating.

Electron temperature increases with electron density under microwave irradiation.

Abstract

We address the problem of overheating of electrons trapped on the liquid helium surface by cyclotron resonance excitation. Previous experiments, suggest that electrons can be heated to temperatures up to 1000K more than three order of magnitude higher than the temperature of the helium bath in the sub-Kelvin range. In this work we attempt to discriminate between a redistribution of thermal origin and other out-of equilibrium mechanisms that would not require so high temperatures like resonant photo-galvanic effects, or negative mobilities. We argue that for a heating scenario the direction of the electron flow under cyclotron resonance can be controlled by the shape of the initial electron density profile, with a dependence that can be modeled accurately within the Poisson-Boltzmann theory framework. This provides an self consistency-check to probe if the redistribution is indeed consistent with a thermal origin. We find that while our experimental results are consistent with the Poisson-Boltzmann theoretical dependence but some deviations suggest that other physical mechanisms can also provide a measurable contribution. Analyzing our results with the heating model we find that the electron temperatures increases with electron density under the same microwave irradiation conditions. This unexpected density dependence calls for a microscopic treatment of the energy relaxation of overheated electrons.