Decay and fusion as two different mechanisms of stability loss for the (C20)2 cluster dimer
Abstract
The thermal stability of the (C20)2 cluster dimer consisting of two C20 fullerenes is examined using a tight-binding approach. Molecular dynamics simulations of the (C20)2 dimer at temperatures T = 2000 - 3500 K show that the finite lifetime τ of this metastable system is determined by two fundamentally different processes, the decay of one of the C20 fullerenes and the fusion of two C20 fullerenes into the C40 cluster. The activation energies for these processes Ea = 3.4 and 2.7 eV, respectively, as well as their frequency factors, have been determined by analyzing the dependence of τ on T.
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