The mobility of negative charges in liquid hydrogen

Abstract

There is a great difference in behavior of e− in liquid hydrogen and helium despite the fact that the adopted theories of the mobility are quite similar. Recently, Levchenko and Mezhov-Deglin (Journal of Low Temperature Physics,89, 457 (1992)) reported large discrepancies of the mobility of the electrons in liquid hydrogen from estimates based on the theory that the electrons are trapped in bubbles forming atomlike structures (“bubblonium”). They properly suggested that these deviations are related to the existence in liquid hydrogen of another, metastable type of negative charge carrier. The subject of the current paper is the physical explanation of the existence of two types of carriers in liquid hydrogen. We attribute the second type of carriers to the cluster ionH−(H2)x, which is created by the formation of solid hydrogen around a bound state of a hydride ion. We provide estimates for the radius and the kinetics of degradation of the “snowball” formed around theH− ion on the basis of energy diagrams for a hydride ion submerged in liquid hydrogen.