The role of dimers in evaporation of small argon clusters.

Evaporation of small Lennard-Jones argon clusters has been studied using molecular dynamic simulations. An extensive library of clusters with 4, 5, 6, 11, and 21 atoms has been obtained from an earlier study. Analysis of the evaporation properties of the clusters indicate, that the fraction of dimer evaporations of all evaporation events increases with the total energy of the cluster. The fraction of evaporated dimers from clusters with a constant lifetime is independent of the cluster size for short-lived clusters and increases with cluster size for long-lived clusters. Only a few percent of the clusters which are long lived enough to participate in vapor-liquid nucleation decay by emitting dimers. The mean cluster lifetime as a function of total energy shows the same exponentially decreasing trend for monomer and dimer evaporation channels. The fraction of trimer evaporations is found to be vanishingly small.