Densely Packed Small Clusters of Atoms

Abstract

WHEN real materials are randomly packed, the possible existence of local very dense regions may affect the porosity of the system. Earlier packing studies have dealt with hard spheres^1–7, but we now examine the packing of real atoms—particles with a potential having a long range attraction and a short range repulsion. Real potentials allow a distribution of nearest, neighbour distances. We show, for a Lennard–Jones potential, that there exist very dense low energy structures for clusters of 13 and 55 atoms.