Theoretical study of IR and photoelectron spectra of small gallium-arsenide clusters

Abstract

Relative stabilities of small GanAsm clusters, as well as their structural electronic and vibrational properties, were computed and analysed using a CCSD(T) reference method since experimental data in this area are sparse or unknown. With the aim of investigating larger clusters, we explored several DFT functionals and basis sets able to mimic the reliable CCSD(T) approach. Among them, the PBE0/SBKJC+sp,d appears as the most efficient to describe the structural and vibrational properties since average differences of about 0.042Å and 5.1cm−1 were obtained for bond lengths and fundamental vibrational frequencies, respectively for the first small clusters [1] of the series found from our GSAM method [2]. As further test, this model is used in order to investigate and revisit an experimental IR spectrum of GanAsm mixture previously published by Li et al. [3]. More complicated is the difficulty which arises in the electronic description due to the presence of numerous low lying electronic states nearly degenerated to correctly describe the electronic structure. The case of Ga2As will be discussed and the photoelectron spectra of the Ga2As anion reanalyzed on the ground of our calculations [4] comparatively to the experimental spectra obtained by Neumark and co-workers [5].