Polaronic aspects of two-dimensional electrons on films of liquid He

Abstract

We have formulated the problem of two-dimensional electrons on a film of liquid helium as a polaron problem and have used the Feynman formulation of the polaron to compute the ground-state energy and the effective mass of the system for all values of the coupling constant (from strong to weak). We find that the effective mass undergoes an extremely rapid transition from an electronic value to a value on the order of several helium-atom masses for coupling constants which are easily attainable; i. e., a "localization" transition occurs.