Fragmentation phase transition in atomic clusters II - Symmetry of fission of metal clusters

We present a statistical fragmentation study of doubly charged alkali (Li, Na, K) and antimony clusters, The evaporation of one charged trimer is the most dominant decay channel (asymmetric fission) at low excitation energies. For small sodium clusters this was quite early found in molecular dynamical calculations by Landman et al. [1]. For doubly charged lithium clusters, we predict Li-9(+) to be the preferential dissociation channel. As already seen experimentally a more symmetric fission is found for doubly charged antimony clusters. This different behavior compared to the alkali metal clusters is in our model essentially due to a larger fissility of antimony. This is checked by repeating the calculations for Na-52(++) with a bulk fissility parameter set artificially equal to the value of Sb.