Sliding of Electron Crystal of Finite Size on the Surface of Superfluid He-4 Confined in a Microchannel

Abstract

We present a new study of the nonlinear transport of a two-dimensional electron crystal on the surface of liquid helium confined in a 10 micrometer-wide channel in which the effective length of the crystal can be varied from 10 to 215 micrometers. At low driving voltages, the moving electron crystal is strongly coupled to deformation of the liquid surface arising from resonant excitation of surface capillary waves, ripplons, while at higher driving voltages the crystal decouples from the deformation. We find strong dependence of the decoupling threshold of the driving electric field acting on the electrons, on the size of the crystal. In particular, the threshold electric field significantly decreases when the length of the crystal becomes shorter than 25 micrometers. We explain this effect as arising from weakening of surface deformations due to radiative loss of resonantly-excited ripplons from an electron crystal of finite size, and we account for the observed effect using an instructive analytical model.

arXiv comment5 figures

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Nonlinear Dynamics, Avalanches and Noise for Driven Wigner Crystals
• Transport properties of a quasi-1D Wigner Solid on liquid helium confined in a microchannel with periodic potential
• Static and dynamic phases of a Tonks-Girardeau gas in an optical lattice
• Noise and Thermal Depinning of Wigner Crystals