Effect of Helium Surface Fluctuations on the Rydberg Transition of Trapped Electrons

Abstract Electrons trapped on the surface of liquid helium is an extremely clean system which holds promise for a scalable qubit platform. However, the superfluid surface is not free from fluctuations which might cause the decay and dephasing of the electron’s quantized states. Understanding and mitigating these fluctuations is essential for the advancement of electrons-on-helium qubit technology. Some work has been recently done to investigate surface oscillations due to the mechanical vibration of the cryostat using a superconducting coplanar waveguide resonator. In the present work, we focus on a sub-hertz frequency range and observe a strong effect of surface oscillations on the temporal dynamics of the Rydberg transition of electrons confined in a microchannel trapping device. We suggest possible origin of such oscillations and find a reasonable agreement between the corresponding estimation of the oscillation frequency and the observed result.