Liquid-drop model for fragmentation of multiply charged mercury clusters.

The fragmentation of doubly and triply charged mercury clusters is theoretically studied to analyze an experiment performed by Katakuse's group at Osaka University [T. Satoh et al., J. Mass Spectrom. Soc. Jpn. 51, 391 (2003)]. The fission barrier is calculated using a liquid-drop model proposed by Echt et al. In the decay of doubly charged clusters, the barrier height is found to take the minimum value for nearly symmetric fission. On the other hand, in the decay of triply charged clusters, the barrier is the lowest for strongly asymmetric fission. These results well explain the product size distribution observed in the experiment. The appearance size for multiply charged clusters measured in the experiment is found to be the size where the fission barrier is equal to the monomer evaporation energy. These findings provide evidence that small mercury clusters behave like van der Waals clusters in the process of fragmentation.