Icosahedral order in transition metal clusters

The present paper is aimed at studying the transition from the molecular to the bulk behaviour of (fcc) transition metals. To this purpose, the cohesive energies of cluster of different size and shape have been computed by means of a many-body tight binding potential. The resulting energies for the different structure and size have been reported and interpreted according to simple nuclear fits. It turned out that clusters consisting of some thousands atoms already exhibit the typical fee behaviour. First neighbours distance contractions have been reproduced as expected from many experimental measurements.