Study of Electron Correlations in Pb‐Clusters

Abstract

Chemical Bond / ClustersThe ground state properties of Pbi + -clusters are investigated using a many-body Hamiltonian with intraand inter-atomic Coulomb interactions. By solving the model exactly we obtain that Pb:+ is metastable (lifetime T > 1O4Os) and that it has isosceles geometry (bondangle 0 = 124"). The importance of electron correlations for the stability of doubly charged clusters is discussed. By comparison between the exact solution and several variational approaches we particularly show that both the metastability and isosceles shape of Pb:+ result mainly from antiferromagnetic quantum spin-fluctuations.