Melting and the electronic absorption of benzene-argon clusters

The coexistence of sharp and broad features in the electronic spectrum of a chromophore embedded in a rare-gas cluster has been interpreted as a signature of solid-liquid phase coexistence in the melting transition. We peform molecular-dynamics simulations of benzene-ArN clusters which show that the observed spectra features are instead dominated by inhomogeneous broadening due to various cluster configurations.