Density functional calculations for shell closures in Mg clusters

Motivated by recent measurements on Mg clusters we discuss the electronic structure and shell closures of these type of systems in the framework of self-consistent mean fields derived from density-functional theory. The ionic background is treated at different levels of refinement: spherical jellium model, and the spherically-averaged-pseudo-potential scheme (SAPS) with local as well as non-local pseudo-potentials. The ionic positions in SAPS are optimized using a Metropolis simulated annealing. It is shown that the details of ionic background influence sensitively the electronic levels sequence near the Fermi energy. In particular, the non-local effects from the pseudo-potential change the relations between states with high and with low angular momentum. Some of these effects go into the right direction towards experiment