Lowering of surface melting temperature in atomic clusters with a nearly closed shell structure
Abstract
We investigate the interplay of particle number, N, and structural properties of selected clusters with N=12 up to N=562 by employing Gupta potentials parameterized for Aluminum and extensive Monte-Carlo simulations. Our analysis focuses on closed shell structures with extra atoms. The latter can put the cluster under a significant stress and we argue that typically such a strained system exhibits a reduced energy barrier for (surface) diffusion of cluster atoms. Consequently, also its surface melting temperature, T_S, is reduced, so that T_S separates from and actually falls well below the bulk value. The proposed mechanism may be responsible for the suppression of the surface melting temperature observed in a recent experiments.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0912.2760,
title = {Lowering of surface melting temperature in atomic clusters with a nearly closed shell structure},
author = {A. Bagrets and R. Werner and F. Evers and G. Schneider and D. Schooss and P. Woelfle},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0912.2760},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
9 pages, 7 figures, 1 table, REVTeX 4; submitted to Phys.Rev.B