Energy landscapes of planar colloidal clusters.
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Authors
Morgan, John WR
Wales, David J
Abstract
A short-ranged pairwise Morse potential is used to model colloidal clusters with planar morphologies. Potential and free energy global minima as well as rearrangement paths, obtained by basin-hopping global optimisation and discrete path sampling, are characterised. The potential and free energy landscapes are visualised using disconnectivity graphs. The short-ranged potential is found to favour close-packed structures, with the potential energy primarily controlled by the number of nearest neighbour contacts. In the case of quasi-degeneracy the free energy global minimum may differ from the potential energy global minimum. This difference is due to symmetry effects, which result in a higher entropy for structures with lower symmetry.
Description
Keywords
0101 Pure Mathematics
Journal Title
Nanoscale
Conference Name
Journal ISSN
2040-3364
2040-3372
2040-3372
Volume Title
6
Publisher
Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC)
Publisher DOI
Sponsorship
This work was financially supported by the EPSRC and the ERC. J.M. acknowledges the support of a Sackler Studentship from the University of Cambridge.