Shell effects on stability and fragmentation of multiply charged rare gas clusters

Geometrical shell effects on stability and fragmentation of multiply charged rare gas clusters are theoretically investigated. Appearance sizes of multiply charged clusters are calculated using the global minimum energies of Lennard-Jones clusters and the liquid drop model (LDM) at temperature T = 0 K. The present calculation gives smaller appearance sizes than those in a previous calculation at T = 40 K. As for Arn2+andArn3+, the present calculation well reproduces the results of a previous experiment. Shell effects of parent clusters are observed in the appearance size when LDM predicts an appearance size that is slightly larger than a magic number.

Fission barriers of Xen4+ as functions of n. Solid (dashed) line represents with (without) shell corrections.