In:
The Journal of Chemical Physics, AIP Publishing, Vol. 125, No. 1 ( 2006-07-07)
Kurzfassung:
Ultracold nanodroplets of helium-4, containing several thousands of He atoms, offer considerable promise as microscopic cryogenic chambers. Potential applications include the creation of tailor-made chemical or biomolecular complexes and studies of superfluidity in nanoscale systems. Recent experiments have succeeded in interrogating droplets of quantum solvent which consist of as few as 1–20 helium-4 atoms and which contain a single solute molecule. This allows the transition from a floppy, but essentially molecular, complex to a dissolved molecule to be followed and, surprisingly, the transition is found to occur quite rapidly, in some cases for as few as N=7–20 solvent atoms. For example, in experiments on helium-4 droplets seeded with CO molecules [Tang and McKellar, J. Chem. Phys. 119, 754 (2003)], two series of transitions are observed which correlate with the a-type (ΔK=0) and b-type (ΔK=±1) lines of the binary complex, CO–He (K is the quantum number associated with the projection of the total angular momentum onto the vector connecting the atom and the molecular center of mass). The a-type series, which evolves from the end-over-end rotational motion of the CO–He binary complex, saturates to the nanodroplet limit for as few as 10–15 helium-4 atoms, i.e., the effective moment of inertia of the molecule converges to its asymptotic (solvated) value quite rapidly. In cont rast, the b-type series, which evolves from the free-molecule rotational mode, disappears altogether for N≈7 atoms. Similar behavior is observed in recent computational studies of HCN(He4)N droplets [Paolini et al., J. Chem. Phys. 123, 114306 (2005)]. In this article the quantum solvation of HCN in small helium-4 droplets is studied using a new fixed-node diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) procedure. In this approach a Born-Oppenheimer-type separation of radial and angular motions is introduced as a means of computing nodal surfaces of the many-body wave functions which are required in the fixed-node DMC method. Excited rotational energies are calculated for HCN(He4)N droplets with N=1–20: the adiabatic node approach also allows concrete physical mechanisms to be proposed for the predicted disappearance of the b-type series as well as the rapid convergence of the a-type series to the nanodroplet limit with increasing N. The behavior of the a-type series is traced directly to the mechanics of angular momentum coupling—and decoupling—between identical bosons and the molecular rotor. For very small values of N there exists significant angular momentum coupling between the molecule and the helium atoms: at N≈10 solvation appears to be complete as evidenced by significant decoupling of the molecule and solvent angular momenta. The vanishing of the b-type series is predicted to be a result of increasing He–He repulsion as the number of solvent atoms increases.
Materialart:
Online-Ressource
ISSN:
0021-9606
,
1089-7690
Sprache:
Englisch
Verlag:
AIP Publishing
Publikationsdatum:
2006
ZDB Id:
3113-6
ZDB Id:
1473050-9
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