Ground-State Clusters for Short-Range Attractive and Long-Range Repulsive Potentials

We report calculations of the ground-state energies and geometries for clusters of different sizes (up to 80 particles), where individual particles interact simultaneously via a short-ranged attractive potential, modeled with a generalization of the Lennard-Jones potential, and a long-ranged repulsive Yukawa potential. We show that for specific choices of the parameters of the repulsive potential, the ground-state energy per particle has a minimum at a finite cluster size. For these values of the parameters in the thermodynamic limit, at low temperatures and small packing fractions, where clustering is favored and cluster-cluster interactions can be neglected, thermodynamically stable cluster phases can be formed. The analysis of the ground-state geometries shows that the spherical shape is marginally stable. In the majority of the studied cases, we find that above a certain size, ground-state clusters preferentially grow almost in one dimension.