On Charged Mesoscopic Metallic Bubbles

Abstract

We investigate the existence of stable charged metallic bubbles using the shell correction method. We find that for a given mesoscopic system of n atoms of a given metal and q less n (positive) elementary charges, a metallic bubble turns out to have a lower total energy than a compact spherical cluster, whenever the charge number q is larger than acritical charge number q_c. For a magic number (n-q) of free electrons, the spherical metallic bubble may become stable against fission.