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On the electronic structure of Hgn and Hg+ n aggregates
P. Joyes, R.J. Tarento
To cite this version:
P. Joyes, R.J. Tarento. On the electronic structure of Hgn and Hg+ n aggregates. Journal de Physique,
1989, 50 (18), pp.2673-2681. �10.1051/jphys:0198900500180267300�. �jpa-00211092�
On the electronic structure of Hgn and Hg+n aggregates
P. Joyes (1) and R. J. Tarento (1,2)
(1) Laboratoire de Physique des Solides, Bât. 510, Université Paris-Sud, 91405 Orsay, France
(2) Laboratoire de Physique des Matériaux, 1 place Aristide Briand, 92295 Meudon, France (Reçu le 19 mai 1989, révisé le 14 juin 1989, accepté le 16 juin 1989)
Résumé.
2014Nous étudions les agrégats de mercure où un changement dans la nature de la liaison
chimique apparaît aux faibles nombres d’atomes. Dans une première partie, nous considérons les
agrégats neutres où la transition métal ~ Van der Waals apparaît pour nc ~ 15, résultat en bon accord avec un autre travail théorique. Dans une deuxième partie, nous étudions l’énergie
d’ionisation I. Pour n ~ 50, un modèle de type métallique donne le bon ordre de grandeur. Pour
n ~ 10, ce modèle ne convient plus et nous présentons une autre méthode où les résultats
expérimentaux, pour n ~ 4, sont utilisés pour fixer les paramètres. Pour 4 n ~ 7, l’accord avec
l’expérience est bon. Nous examinons aussi le problème de la localisation de la charge positive en
excès dans Hg+n.
Abstract.
2014We study small mercury aggregates in which the nature of the chemical bonding changes with respect of the bulk. In a first part, we consider neutral aggregates for which we find that the transition from the metallic to the Van der Waals bonding occurs for nc ~ 15 in close agreement with a previous theoretical work. In a second part we study the ionization energy I. For n ~ 50, a simple metallic model gives the experimental order of magnitude. This model is
no longer valid in the n ~ 10 range for which we present another calculation. In this study we fix
our parameters by using the experimental values for n ~ 4. For 4 n ~ 7, our results are in agreement with experiment. We also examine the localization of the excess positive charge.
Classification
Physics Abstracts
36.40 - 31.20
1. Introduction.
Mercury is one of the divalent elements where a change in the nature of the chemical bonding
can be expected when the average connectivity varies (here, connectivity means the number
of nearest neighbours per atom). This has first been observed in the bulk phase, when the liquid is expanded, at a density of about 8-9 g/cm3, a metal-insulator transition is observed [1].
This conclusion was obtained by electrical conduction, thermopower, Hall coefficient and
Knight shift studies (Refs. given in [1]). Several theoretical works have been devoted to this
question and the general interpretation is that, as the density decreases, a gap appears at the Fermi level, between the s and the p bands, which causes the insulator behaviour [2, 3].
Another situation where the connectivity is lowered with respect to the bulk appears for
Hgn aggregates. There again, when n decreases, numerous interesting physical effects have
been observed : we will mention three of them.
Article published online by EDP Sciences and available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/jphys:0198900500180267300
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a) One knows that in metallic aggregates (alkalis, noble or transition metals) the ionization
potential I(R) as well as the electronic affinity AE(R) exhibits R-1 dependence.
R is the radius of the aggregate [4-7]
(W is the bulk work-function). For mercury it has been shown [8] that 7(/?) followed relation
(1) only for large sizes (n -- 70). In this study R is related to n, the number of atoms, by
R
=ro n 1/3 where ro is an atomic radius. For smaller sizes, the experimental values are larger
than the predictions of relation (1) by more than one eV in the range n -- 10. Let us notice that in the analysis of reference [8] the factor 3/8 of relation (1) is replaced by 1/2 but this does not alter the general conclusion.
The previous observation has been interpreted as due to a change in the chemical bonding
which would occur in a progressive way for ne S 70. For n ::-.> nc the nature of the bonding is
the same as in the bulk and for n s nc the metallic character is progressively lost in a transition
towards a Van der Waals bonding (as in rare gases). The physical explanation of this
transition is the same as for the bulk metal-insulator transition mentioned before. As the
connectivity decreases, the s and p bands separate and there is no longer any covalent bonding
because in the s band the bonding and the antibonding levels are complete.
b) Another experimental observation tends to confirm this conclusion. In metallic aggregates it is usually observed that the average interatomic distance d(R) decreases with size [9, 10]. Simple models have been proposed to interpret this behaviour [11, 12]. They lead
to a relation between d and Z (the average connectivity) :
where the subscript oo refers to the bulk phase and where p and q are coefficients which give
the dependence on the interatomic distance r of the repulsion energy between atomic cores
(a exp (- pr ) ) and of the electronic energy (a - exp (- qr ) ). As for the metallic elements
p
>q, the application of (3) in the whole size range gives the expected decrease of
d with Z. Mercury does not follow this general behaviour since d (R ) increases from the bulk to the dimer (d. = 3.03 Â, d(Hg2)
=3.36 Â [13]). This effect can be interpreted as a
transition to Van der Waals bonding as n decreases since it is known that in this type of bonding an increase of d(R) is expected as R decreases [14].
An experimental study of d (R ) for mercury has not yet been made. Such a study might
reveal the two regimes discussed before : decrease with R before the Van der Waals transition and increase after it.
c) Another interesting experimental result has been given by the study of the inner shell autoionization spectrum [15, 16]. The atomic transition which is studied is
where the d state is either d5/2 or d3/2. When this kind of excitation occurs in Hgn it first keeps
its atomic character but, since the excitation energy is larger than the ionization energy of the aggregate, ionization occurs after a time of about 10-13 s. Let us notice that ionization occurs
for both d5/2 and d3/2 excitations for n :::. 2 but it occurs only for the d5/2 excitation in the atom.
Two regimes are observed. For Az 12, the excitation energy is inversely proportional to
n in a way which is characteristic of an excitonic behaviour. As an exciton is created one may
conclude that in this range of n values the bonding is of Van der Waals type. For 12 rx n s 40 the previous 1/n dependence is no longer followed which shows that a deviation from a Van der Waals bonding in the whole aggregate begins to appear. It has also been observed that the shape of the experimental lines is markedly asymmetric for aggregates larger than n - 20 which is an illustration of a gradual evolution towards the bulk character.
The three experimental results mentioned above lead us to the conclusion that a change in
the nature of the chemical bonding occurs in Hgn at a value nc of about some tens of atoms.
The fact that all the experiments do not give exactly the same value for nc seems to be less
important, the main point being the existence of a transition.
Let us notice that, once the covalent bonding begins to appear, the electronic properties are
still far from the bulk ones. The study of the evolution with size of each of them will be done
separately and is not in the scope of this paper.
We will limit ourselves to band structure considerations in Hgn and will study (Sect. 2) the
decrease of the mixing of the s and p bands as the size decreases. We use a tight binding
method whose results agree for small sizes with previous calculations [16] and has the
advantage of being easily extendable to aggregates with n
>100.
In section 3, we will examine Hg’ ions and particularly the localization of the excess singly positive charge in these aggregates. Let us discuss briefly this question.
According to the general laws of electrostatics when a macroscopic conducting medium is charged, the charges tend to localize at the surface of the medium where they adopt the spatial distribution which minimizes their electrostatic repulsion energy. This kind of model has been extended to metallic aggregates. For example, it has been used for determining the
critical number of atoms, nP (X) above which Xn + aggregates (X is a given element) begin to
be stable. For copper the agreement between theoretical results and experiments is satisfactory : n;ri (Cu )theo
=14 [17] ; n;ri (Cu )exp
=20 [18]. Let us notice that the foremen- tioned experimental value has been recently confirmed by results on silver and gold :
n 3j(Ag)
=22 ; n 3 (Au)
=17 [19] which are of the same order of magnitude.
As a change in the nature of bonding seems to occur in neutral aggregates, one may wonder whether a similar change could occur in ionized aggregates. In this spirit, a discussion of a
possible « Van der Waals » structure of Hgn + is given in [20] where the
«2+
»charge is
localised on one central site. This model allows us to understand why particles such as
Hg 5 2+ do exist whereas a calculation of their stability by a metallic model leads to the opposite
conclusion. Let us notice that the problem of the charge localization in ionized divalent aggregates is a general question also studied in [21] for Mgn + and [22] for Ben + .
2. Neutral Hgn.
For determining the binding energy per atom Ec and also the ionization energy of
Hgn aggregates we use the following Hamiltonian which describes the coupling between an s
and a p bands
where the notation is the same as in reference [3] and where e, and Ep are the energies of the
atomic 6s and 6p levels ; ts, tp and y2 are the intersite hopping integrals s
--+s,
p -+ p and s
-p and y 1 is the intrasite hopping integral s
-p.
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The method of resolution of (4) is detailed in [12]. In this work, it is shown that the energies
of the three bands Ep(i ) (doubly degenerate), ESP(i ) and EPS(i ) (singly degenerate) are given by :
where e (i ) are the n (non-dimensioned) eigenvalues (1 * 1 * n ) of the matrix obtained from 4 by letting Ep
=-S=tp= yl = y2 = 0 and ts=l.
Our calculations have been performed on three cuboctahedral : shapes with n = 13, 55 and 147, with ep - e,
=6.1 eV, ts
= -0.6 eV, tp
= -0.5 eV, Y2
=0.2 eV, YI
=0. These shapes
have already been used for the study of Hgn aggregates [16, 23]. Our parameters are of the
same order of magnitude as those given in [23]. They are justified in particular by the fact they give the correct bulk limit for Ec as we will see below. Let us also note that in our calculation there is one parameter less than in reference [23] since we have only one p --+ p integral
instead of two.
One of the advantages of equations (5) and (6) is to allow the study of large aggregates since
we only need to know the n 6 (i ) values. The method can also be extended to the bulk by using in (5) and (6) the e (i ) values deduced from periodic fcc boundary conditions. We then obtain E,
=0.52 eV, a value which is close to the measured cohesive energy per atom
-
0.5 eV [20]. Our other Ec values are given in table 1 they are very similar to those obtained in [16], 0.20 and 0.28 eV instead of 0.20 and 0.27 eV for n = 13 and 55, respectively. We also give the values of the energy difference between the one-electron Fermi level and the 6s atomic level. We observe that this quantity increases with n.
An evaluation of the binding energy in a Van der Waals bonding is :
This evaluation, made in [16], gives 0.14 eV and 0.20 eV for n
=13 and 55 respectively.
A comparison with the Ec values of table 1 would lead to the conclusion that the covalent
bonding is more stable than the Van der Waals bonding, even for n = 13. However we have not taken into account the reduction of the covalent energy due to the electronic correlations.
One knows that the larger the reduction, the smaller n, as it has been shown by using the
Gutzwiller technique for an s band [24, 25]. If we adopt the estimate made in [16] of the
electronic correlation effect (reduction of the cohesive energy of 0.07 eV and 0.03 eV for
n
=13 and 55 respectively) we are led to corrected covalent energies of 0.13 eV and 0.25 eV for n = 13 and 55 respectively. Now we see that the covalent energy is smaller than
Ev,dw for n
=13. This means that for n smaller than about 15 there appears a transition from the metallic to the Van der Waals bonding.
3. Ionized Hg§ .
3.1 LARGE SIZES, n > 50.
-For relatively large sizes (n > 50) in all the models the electronic structure is assumed to be of the same nature as in the bulk (hybridization between
the s and p bands). Then the metallic ionization energy is given by a formula like equation (1)
where the 3 e2/8 R term expresses the potential energy of the Hg’ aggregate which is globally
charged. However equation (1) which is valid for alkalis [5, 6] must be modified before being
applied to our problem.
Indeed, in the case of alkalis, the one-electron Fermi energy of the s band is, for any n, close to the es atomic energy. In particular when n --+ oo, the one-electron Fermi energy (of
a cc lattice) tends towards es (symmetric band). This is not the case for Hgn since the one-
electron Fermi energy, EF, increases with n (see Tab. I). We have to take this into account by writing, instead of (1)
In table 1 we give the values obtained for I(R) with R
=ro n1/3,
,ro
=1.51 Â (average
distance in the bulk) and the experimental values when available. We see that the agreement between experiment and theory is rather good for n - 55. On the contrary there is a difference between experiment and the theoretical result for n - 13. This discrepancy was expected since
in this range of n values the metal-like structure is no longer valid.
Table I . - Size dependence of the cohesive energy (Ee), the Fermi level (El,) (origin of the energies : the 6s atomic level) and the ionization potentiel (I) in Hgn. The values obtained in
reference [16] are given in parentheses.
3.2 SMALL SIZES, n 10. The fact that neutral Hgn exhibits a changing in the chemical bond prompts an intriguing question concerning the charge localization in ionized
H ’ . Indeed, for n 10, as the structure of the neutral aggregate is Van der Waals-like, one
may think that as in Van der Waals ionized aggregates (Xe’ [26, 27]) the positive hole is
localized on one (or on a few) central site.
In this range of n values the s band is completely separated from the p band. For example,
our calculation of section 2 gives a gap of about 2 eV for n
=13. Therefore we think that it is
justified to describe mercury ionized aggregates by only considering the external 6s levels.
This assumption, which can also be applied to aggregates of other divalent elements such as
Mg [21], is well justified in the case of Hg where the energy difference between 6s and 6p
levels is large (- 6, 1 eV) in comparison to 2.7 eV for Be or Mg [28].
The main features of our model for Hg’ aggregates with n , 8 are the following :
the wave function is an expansion on a set of atomic determinants. Each determinant describes n - 1 electrons, see figure 1 for the case n
=3 ;
-
for each n value, we study two kinds of shapes. Firstly, geometries where all the distances are equal and short di = dl. In these shapes the positive charge is shared between all the sites which are almost equivalent : the hole is delocalized. Secondly, geometries with two possible distances dl and d2 > dl where, as we will see, the hole is mainly localized on a
limited number of sites (2 or 3) ;
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