What is the ground-state structure of intermediate-sized carbon clusters?

A comprehensive study on the relative structural stability of various nanostructures of carbon clusters (including fullerenes, cages, onions, icosahedral clusters, bucky-diamond clusters, spherically bulk terminated clusters, and clusters with faceted termination) in the range of d < 5 nm has been carried out using a semi-empirical method based on a self-consistent and environment-dependent/linear combination of atomic orbital (SCED-LCAO) Hamiltonian. It was found that among these nanostructures with the same diameter, fullerenes are still the most stable structure, in contrast to the icosahedral cluster being the ground state structure for a series of discrete n values for other tetravalent clusters. The transformations from a bucky-diamond structure to an onion structure, or to a cage structure, or from an onion structure to a cage structure have been observed using a finite temperature molecular dynamics scheme based on the SCED-LCAO Hamiltonian. It was also found that the size-dependence of the HOMO-LUMO gap of fullerene shows an oscillation as a function of its diameter (d). Such oscillation is associated with the symmetry of the fullerene, and the magnitude of oscillation appears to decrease as its size increases.