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Fabricating van der Waals Heterostructures with Precise Rotational Alignment
Published on: July 5, 2019
Fully retarded van der Waals interaction between dielectric nanoclusters.
Hye-Young Kim1, Jorge O Sofo, Darrell Velegol
1Department of Physics, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA. hye-young.kim@selu.edu
The Journal of Chemical Physics
|November 15, 2006
Summary
The study reveals that many-body interactions significantly impact van der Waals forces between clusters, even at large distances. Higher-than-three-body interactions are attractive and crucial for accurate calculations.
Area of Science:
- Physical Chemistry
- Computational Chemistry
- Materials Science
Background:
- Van der Waals (dispersion) interactions are crucial for understanding atom-cluster and cluster-cluster interactions at large separations.
- Accurate calculation of these interactions requires considering the polarizability of clusters.
Purpose of the Study:
- To calculate the van der Waals interaction between atom-cluster and cluster-cluster systems at large separations.
- To investigate the significance of many-body (MB) interactions beyond three-body terms.
- To develop a generalizable method for dielectric clusters of any shape or size.
Main Methods:
- Clusters are treated as point particles with polarizability tensors.
- Static polarizability is calculated by self-consistently including all MB intracluster atomic interactions.
- Results are compared with methods assuming pairwise additive interactions and including three-body corrections.
Main Results:
- Higher-than-three-body MB interactions are consistently attractive and non-negligible at large separations.
- For silica-like clusters, these higher-order terms can contribute up to 42% of the pairwise sum.
- The contribution is sensitive to cluster anisotropy and orientation, unlike additive models.
Conclusions:
- Common assumptions underestimating higher-than-three-body MB interactions are inaccurate.
- A comprehensive MB approach is necessary for precise van der Waals interaction calculations in clusters.
- The developed method provides a power law expansion of van der Waals interaction in terms of n-body interactions.
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