On the shattering of clusters by surface impact heating

The onset of a shattering regime when a supersonic cluster undergoes an ultrafast heating by its impact at a surface, proposed on the basis of an information theoretic analysis, has now been demonstrated experimentally for molecular clusters. It is emphasized that the sudden onset of shattering as a function of impact velocity is a robust result depending essentially only on the multitude of possible isomers of larger clusters. There is one underlying assumption of the information theoretic approach-namely that there is a rather rapid thermalization of the translational degrees of freedom of the impact heated cluster so that mean energy is the only energetic constraint. When this is not necessarily the case, e.g., for ionic clusters at lower energies, there will not be extensive fragmentation. (C) 1996 American Institute of Physics.