Development of the electrohydrodynamic instability of charged liquid helium surface*

Electrons on the surface of liquid helium behave as an ideal 2-dimensional electron system (2DES), whereas helium surface can't bear more than a certain critical electron density. Once the critical electron density is reached, the helium surface becomes unstable which ultimately results in the formation of MEBs. in this work, we present experimental observations of the dynamics of the instability and its temporal dependence on the surface electron density. Image analysis based on Fast Fourier Transforms was used to determine the unstable wave vectors from the acquired images, which was found to agree well with the theoretical formulae.