Evaporation and cluster abundance spectra

Statistical fragmentation can give valuable information on the internal structure of clusters due to the strong dependence of the evaporation rate on the activation energy for the process. In particular, the abundances in an ensemble of hot clusters will reflect the relative stabilities of the individual species. We derive the relation between evaporative activation energies and relative abundances for large clusters. Quantitative criteria for the applicability of the theory are derived and the analytical results are compared with numerical simulations.