Lognormal size distributions of elemental clusters

✍ Scribed by Chun-Ru Wang; Rong-Bin Huang; Zhao-Yang Liu; Lan-Sun Zheng

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1994
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 536 KB
• Volume: 227
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0009-2614
• DOI: 10.1016/0009-2614(94)00790-x

✦ Synopsis

The size distribution of various elemental clusters has been studied by time-of-flight mass spectrometry. By analyzing thousands of mass spectra of clusters, and in the light of statistical analysis of cluster formation, a statistical distribution model of clusters is put forward. If the size distribution of a series of clusters can be fitted by a lognormal curve then the series of clusters will usually possess analogous structural configurations and similar structural stabilities, and vice versa. By using this model, we have studied the clusters of C., S,, Al, and P, generated from laser ablation of different samples, and the size distributions of these clusters consistently show a lognormal form to a high precision.