More on the melting of Lennard-Jones clusters

The melting of 13-atom clusters interacting via Lennard-Jones potentials has been revisited using molecular dynamics coupled to steepest descent quenches. A procedure was devised to account for the fraction of times the global and local minima of the potential energy surface are accessed during a long trajectory. This quantity presents a sigmoid shape. A phenomenological model of melting is given in terms of a correlated walk that maps the short time excursions among the global and local minima in configuration space. Comparison between the simulation results and the theoretical model shows that the melting transition is well described in terms of the temperature changes of the fraction of high energy minima accessed during the cluster trajectory. Cooperativity is clear from the S shape of this quantity, i.e., the access to a local minimum favours the access to other local minima. (orig.)