Core hole screening for intermediate size metal particles

Abstract

A hierarchy of dielectric sphere models is presented to account for the shift in binding energy with particle size for a core hole at the centre of a jellium sphere of radius R. It is shown that the classical final state interaction between the screening charge deficit at the cluster surface and the localised core hole is indeed very important as recently suggested in the literature, so that for a wide range of R the relaxation energy shift is only weakly dependent on metal dielectric properties. The breakdown of this simple classical rule observed below R ∼ 20 a.u. requires further study both theoretical and under more controlled experimental conditions.