Related papers: How Metallic are Small Sodium Clusters?
Electric deflection measurements on liquid helium nanodroplets doped with individual polar molecules demonstrate that the cold superfluid matrix enables full orientation of the molecular dipole along the external field. This translates into…
In recent years it has become possible to study the properties of nanocrystalline metals through atomic-scale simulations of systems with realistic grain sizes. A brief overview of the main results is given, such as the observation of a…
We show that electronic-entropy effects in the size-evolutionary patterns of relatively small (as small as 20 atoms), simple-metal clusters become prominent already at moderate temperatures. Detailed agreement between our…
We present an analysis of the thermodynamic properties of small transition metal clusters and show how the commonly used indicators of phase transitions like peaks in the specific heat or magnetic susceptibility can lead to deceptive…
The electronic structures of a variety of experimentally identified gold and silver nanoclusters from 20 to 246 atoms, either unprotected or protected by several types of ligands, are characterized by using point group specific symmetry…
Formation, stability patterns, and decay channels of silver dianionic and gold trianionic clusters are investigated with Penning-trap experiments and a shell-correction method including shape deformations. The theoretical predictions…
We demonstrate that diffusiophoretic, thermophoretic and chemotactic phenomena in turbulence lead to clustering of particles on multi-fractal sets that can be described using one single framework, valid when the particle size is much…
Microcanonical molecular dynamics study of the spontaneous alloying(SA), which is a manifestation of fast atomic diffusion in a nano-sized metal cluster, is done in terms of a simple two dimensional binary Morse model. Important features…
This study explores the dynamics of charge transport within a cryogenic P-type Ge particle detector, fabricated from a crystal cultivated at the University of South Dakota (USD). By subjecting the detector to cryogenic temperatures and an…
The evolution of the magnetic moment in iron clusters containing 20 to 400 atoms is investigated using first-principles numerical calculations based on density-functional theory and real-space pseudopotentials. Three families of clusters…
Water clusters embedding a nitric acid molecule HNO3(H2O)_{n=1-10} are investigated via electrostatic deflection of a molecular beam. We observe large paraelectric susceptibilities that greatly exceed the electronic polarizability,…
Crystallization from an amorphous atomic structure is usually seen as a spontaneous process in pursuit of a lower energy state, but for alloy systems it is often hard to elucidate because of the intrinsic structural and compositional…
The thermodynamics and kinetics of crystallization of nanoparticles, as opposed to bulk phases, may be influenced by surface and size effects. We investigate the importance of such factors in the crystallization process of gold, silver, and…
Colloidal crystals formed by size-asymmetric binary particles co-assemble into a wide variety of colloidal compounds with lattices akin to ionic crystals. Recently, a transition from a compound phase with a sublattice of small particles to…
Nanocrystal gelation provides a powerful framework to translate nanoscale properties into bulk materials and to engineer emergent properties through the assembled microstructure. However, many established gelation strategies rely on…
For about twenty years, it has been the prevailing view that there can be no metallic state or metal-insulator transition in two dimensions in zero magnetic field. In the last several years, however, unusual behavior suggestive of such a…
We introduce an effect of metallization of dielectric nanofilms by strong, adiabatically varying electric fields. The metallization causes optical properties of a dielectric film to become similar to those of a plasmonic metal (strong…
We explore the relative role of small-scale fragmentation and global collapse in low-metallicity clouds, pointing out that in such clouds the cooling time may be longer than the dynamical time, allowing the cloud to collapse globally before…
The presence of shell structure and the accompanying high level degeneracy leads to a strengthening of the pairing interaction in some metallic nanoclusters and ions. It is predicted that for some specific systems one can expect a large…
The stability of two-component clusters consisting of light (Na or K) and heavy (Rb or Cs) alkali atoms formed on helium nanodroplets is studied by femtosecond laser ionization in combination with mass spectrometry. Characteristic stability…