Electron Clusters in Inert Gases

Abstract

This Letter addresses the counterintuitive behavior of electrons injected into dense cryogenic media with negative scattering length L. Instead of strongly reduced mobility at all but the lowest densities due to the polaronic effect involving the formation of density enhancement clusters (expected in the theory with a simple gas-electron interaction successfully applied earlier to electrons in helium where L>0) which should substantially decrease the electron mobility, an opposite picture is observed: with increasing |L| (the trend taking place for inert gases with the growth of atomic number) and the gas density, the electrons remain practically free. An explanation of this behavior is provided based on consistent accounting for the nonlinearity of the electron interaction with the gaseous medium in the gas atom number density.