Ab Initio Investigation of Helium Bubble Formation from Trapped He+ Ions in Solid Hydrogen

We are involved in a program aimed at a first-principles examination of the possibility of helium bubble formation in solid hydrogen. Our procedure is based on an extension of the Hartree–Fock cluster approach that we have been using for study of individual He⁺ ions in solid hydrogen. The preliminary results of our cluster investigations of a particular configuration of two He⁺ ions in neighboring tetrahedral interstitial positions are presented here. It has been found that the hydrogen molecules common to the two He⁺ ions lead to a substantial attractive force between the ions that almost overcomes their inherent repulsion, leading to a binding energy for this configuration only slightly less than the binding energy for two well separated trapped He⁺ ions. The analysis of our results have suggested future investigations of different pairs of trapping sites which appear to be more favorable for providing higher binding energies for the He⁺ pairs. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.