Abstract The ground-state configurations of the Nbn (n= 2--11) clusters are studied through the first-principles calculations. It is found that niobium clusters (n= 2--11) tend to form compact structures with low symmetry. The clusters with 4, 8 and 10 atoms are found to be magic and have relatively large highest occupied--lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (HOMO-LUMO) gaps. The Nbn clusters possess low magnetic moments, which exhibit an odd-even oscillational character. The analyses of calculated electronic density and population of the lowest-energy niobium clusters for n= 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11 show that the total magnetic moments of Nbn originate mainly from a few Nb atoms with longer spacings between them in most cases, while they are located on two Nb atoms for n= 2, 3, 5. The total magnetic moments come mainly from the 4d local moments but with the exception of the Nb5 cluster.
Received: 04 March 2008
Revised: 29 July 2008
Accepted manuscript online:
Fund: Project supported by the Program
for Science {\&} Technology Innovation Talents in Universities of
Henan Province, China (Grant No 2009HASTIT003), the Natural Science
Foundation of Henan University, China (Grant Nos 07ZRZD005 and
07YBZR046), and the Found
Cite this article:
Ren Feng-Zhu(任凤竹), Wang Yuan-Xu(王渊旭), Zhang Guang-Biao(张光彪), Wei Shu-Ke(魏书克), and Luo You-Hua(罗有华) An ab initio study of niobium (n = 2--11) clusters: structure, stability and magnetism 2009 Chin. Phys. B 18 1491
Altmetric calculates a score based on the online attention an article receives. Each coloured thread in the circle represents a different type of online attention. The number in the centre is the Altmetric score. Social media and mainstream news media are the main sources that calculate the score. Reference managers such as Mendeley are also tracked but do not contribute to the score. Older articles often score higher because they have had more time to get noticed. To account for this, Altmetric has included the context data for other articles of a similar age.
