Structure and thermodynamic characteristics of small inert gas clusters

Abstract

The relaxation dynamics of small groups of identical atoms interacting according to the Lennard-Jones law was studied experimentally. It is shown that for a fixed number of atoms, the probabilities of the formation of clusters with different structures depend on the random initial distribution of atoms in space, i.e., on the initial total energy and geometry of the particle distribution. Probabilities of the emergence of different structures of clusters vary greatly and do not contradict classical statistics. Except in extraordinary cases (e.g., N = 13), distances between the nearest atoms in clusters are different and change with the addition of each subsequent atom. The thermodynamics is constructed from the canonical ensembles of clusters with different numbers of particles. The resulting dependence of the cluster energy on the number of particles proves to be a smooth function, since only pair interactions were taken into account.