Instability of the 2S electron bubbles -: art. no. 105301

The 2S electron bubble placed in liquid helium has been previously believed to be spherical. We show that the 2S bubble is morphologically unstable at pressures above - 1.23 bars. The 2S state being known to be radially unstable at pressures below - 1.33 bars, the result leaves only a very narrow pressure range in which it can be found in a spherical configuration. Our stability analysis indicates that the 2S bubble is unstable against perturbations proportional to any of the third spherical harmonics Y-3m. Our numerical simulations show that there exist nonspherical stable configurations, such as the ones Maris and Konstantinov predicted for the 1P, 1D, and 2P electron bubbles and confirmed experimentally for the 1P. We believe that the 2S bubbles can also be produced and that our prediction will yield itself to experimental verification.