Spatially Resolved Electronic Correlations in Nanoclusters

Recent experimental developments in the creation and diagnostic probing of metallic nanoclusters has made it possible to explore their interaction with electromagnetic radiation, thus revealing information on their electronic properties. Free electrons inside such clusters occupy a very small volume so their characteristics may exhibit significant differences to bulk matter in a similar thermodynamic state. Using high-resolution molecular dynamics simulation, we study electronic correlations of laser-excited, sodium-like nanoclusters. To cover a broad range from nano- to microscale, the momentum autocorrelation function is evaluated for systems ranging from 150 to more than half a million electrons. The Coulomb force computation is accelerated by utilizing the parallel Barnes-Hut tree code PEPC. Complex electronic resonances are found for finite-sized clusters which do not appear in bulk systems. Analysis of these oscillation modes with a new diagnostic technique show that these are located in different spatial regions within the clusters