Magic Melters' Have Geometrical Origin

Abstract

Recent experimental reports bring out extreme size sensitivity in the heat capacities of Gallium and Aluminum clusters. In the present work we report results of our extensive {\it ab initio} molecular dynamical simulations on Ga${}_{30}$ and Ga${}_{31}$, the pair which has shown rather dramatic size sensitivity. We trace the origin of this size sensitive heat capacities to the relative order in their respective ground state geometries. Such an effect of nature of the ground state on the characteristics of heat capacities is also seen in case of small Gallium and Sodium clusters indicating that the observed size sensitivity is a generic feature of small clusters.

4 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Why do gallium clusters have a higher melting point than the bulk?
• First principles investigation of finite-temperature behavior in small sodium clusters
• Thermodynamics of tin clusters
• Size--sensitive melting characteristics of gallium clusters: Comparison of Experiment and Theory for Ga${}_{17}{}^{+}$ and Ga${}_{20}{}^{+}$
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Cited by in corpus (7)

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• The electronic structures, the equilibrium geometries and finite temperature properties of Na_n (n=39-55)
• Changes of graph structure of transition probability matrices indicate the slowest kinetic relaxations
• Slowest kinetic modes revealed by metabasin renormalization
• Mean first passage times reconstruct the slowest relaxations in potential energy landscapes of nanoclusters
• Partial Ionic Bonding in Homogeneous Sodium Clusters