Studies of excited electron decay in photoionization dynamics of Na₂₀inside C₂₄₀

The photoresponse studies on Na [1,2] clusters and fullerenes [3] has already been reported widely over the past few years. A family of novel endohedral fullerenes [4] can be realised by accommodating small metal clusters inside the hollow space of fullerene cages. In this work, the ground state of such an endohedral system, Na₂₀@C₂₄₀, is studied using a jellium-based density functional method with a gradient corrected exchange-correlation functional (LB94). Photoionization (PI) dynamics of this system is studied using a linear response framework called time-dependent local density approximation (TDLDA) [3]. The PI results obtained for Na₂₀@C₂₄₀ , and their comparison with results for isolated Na₂₀ and C₂₄₀ clusters, facilitate detailed understandings of the plasmon and inter-cluster Coloumbic decay (ICD) [5] resonances in the system.

References

[1] Chunlei Xia et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 156802 (2009).

[2] R Shaik, H R Varma and H S Chakraborty, arXiv:2010.04973.

[3] J. Choi et al., Phys. Rev. A 95, 023404 (2017).

[4] Cabrera-Trujillo et al., Phys. Rev. B 53, 16059 (1996).

[5] Cederbaum L S et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 79, 4778 (1997).