Fusion and fragmentation of colliding metal clusters

In this paper, molecular dynamics simulations of collisions involving Nin and Aln clusters are presented. A many-body potential based on tight-binding theory is used to model the interatomic interactions. The influence of several parameters such as cluster initial kinetic energy, size and type of atomic constituent is analyzed. At low energies, fusion reactions occur which are followed, at high bombarding energies, by multifragmentation events of the fused compound cluster. It is found that, for a given energy, the atomic structure and thermal properties of the compound cluster are very different for homo and heteroatomic collisions. We also obtain that the outcome of a heteroatomic collision is strongly affected by the nature of projectile and target atoms, specially in the case of unequally sized colliding clusters