ABSTRACT
Electronic shell structure in metal clusters was first studied in the early 1980s with the advent of experimental cluster sources able to size-select for numbers of atoms, in particular for sizes below 100 atoms. This work was motivated by the increased miniaturisation of electronic devices already by then apparent. A cluster is a particle containing a countable number of atoms. In contrast to atoms, in which the Coulomb force is unambiguously defined, the nuclear potential is less clearly described and must be approximated. On the other hand, the use of effective potentials in describing the nuclear confining potential may be readily transferred to the description of valence electrons in metal clusters, following the early models of Maria Goeppert Mayer. It is worth considering one recent study within which an aspherical potential was explicitly introduced for the description of a 67-atom gold cluster.
