Composition-induced structural transitions in mixed rare-gas clusters

Abstract

The low-energy structures of mixed Ar-Xe and Kr-Xe Lennard-Jones clusters are investigated using a newly developed parallel Monte Carlo minimization algorithm with specific exchange moves between particles or trajectories. Tests on the 13- and 19-atom clusters show a significant improvement over the conventional basin-hopping method, the average search length being reduced by more than one order of magnitude. The method is applied to the more difficult case of the 38-atom cluster, for which the homogeneous clusters have a truncated octahedral shape. It is found that alloys of dissimilar elements (Ar-Xe) favor polytetrahedral geometries over octahedra due to the reduced strain penalty. Conversely, octahedra are even more stable in Kr-Xe alloys than in Kr-38 or Xe-38, and they show a core-surface phase separation behavior. These trends are indeed also observed and further analysed on the 55-atom cluster. Finally, we correlate the relative stability of cubic structures in these clusters to the glass forming character of the bulk mixtures.