On Charged Mesoscopic Metallic Bubbles

TL;DR

This paper explores the stability of charged metallic bubbles at the mesoscopic scale, showing they can be energetically favorable over compact clusters when sufficiently charged, especially at certain electron counts.

Contribution

It introduces a shell correction method to demonstrate conditions under which charged metallic bubbles are more stable than spherical clusters.

Findings

Charged metallic bubbles are energetically favored when charge exceeds a critical value.

Stability against fission occurs at specific electron counts (magic numbers).

The study provides criteria for the formation of stable charged metallic bubbles.

Abstract

We investigate the existence of stable charged metallic bubbles using the shell correction method. We find that for a given mesoscopic system of n atoms of a given metal and q less n (positive) elementary charges, a metallic bubble turns out to have a lower total energy than a compact spherical cluster, whenever the charge number q is larger than acritical charge number q_c. For a magic number (n-q) of free electrons, the spherical metallic bubble may become stable against fission.