Structural and electronic properties of Gen and EuGen-1 nanoclusters: A full potential DFT study

Abstract

In this work, the stability, structure and electronic properties of the nanoclusters of germanium (Gen) and europium atom doped germanium clusters (EuGen-1) with n=2 to 12, 15 and 20 were investigated. First, the stability of nanoclusters such as Gen and EuGen-1 was addressed using FHI-aims as a software package based on the density functional theory. Then the lowest-energy structures were selected for calculating the first vertical ionization with the symmetry adapted cluster-configuration interaction General-R (SAC-CI-General-R) method. The results of this research show that there is a good agreement between calculation and experiment ionization potential for Gen nanoclusters. Generally, the analyses of binding energies show that increasing the size of nanoclusters leads to more stability for nanoclusters. The most stable nanoclusters for EuGen can be created with exchanging the Eu atom in the most stable Gen+1 nanoclusters, but there is an exception for n=11 case. Here, the second difference in energy (∆2E) and gap energy are computed for the stable nanoclusters. The results of ionization energy and second difference in energy confirm that Ge7 and Ge10 also EuGe8 and EuGe10 have the most stability.

Keywords

• germanium nanoclusters
• fhi-aims
• full potential
• first ionization energy
• second difference in energy
• gap energy