Communications: Investigation of the superatomic character of Al13 via its interaction with sulfur atoms

We investigated AlnS- (n=3-15) and AlnS2- (n=7-15) clusters with mass spectrometry and photoelectron spectroscopy. We found that Al-13 is relatively robust when it reacts with sulfur atoms, indicating that it has some superatomic character. However, Al-13 cannot be simply considered as a superatom when it interacts with sulfur due to the following reasons: Al-13's icosahedral structure has been distorted slightly by sulfur atoms; the vertical detachment energies and adiabatic detachment energies of Al13S- and Al13S2- clusters are not significantly different from those of their neighboring clusters; and the charge distributions in Al13S- and Al13S2- do not necessarily associate with superatomic behavior of Al-13. (C) 2010 American Institute of Physics. [doi: 10.1063/1.3374431]