Energy landscapes of planar colloidal clusters

Abstract

A short-ranged pairwise Morse potential is used to model colloidal clusters with planar morphologies. Potential and free energy global minima as well as rearrangement paths, obtained by basin-hopping global optimisation and discrete path sampling, are characterised. The potential and free energy landscapes are visualised using disconnectivity graphs. The short-ranged potential is found to favour close-packed structures, with the potential energy primarily controlled by the number of nearest neighbour contacts. In the case of quasi-degeneracy the free energy global minimum may differ from the potential energy global minimum. This difference is due to symmetry effects, which result in a higher entropy for structures with lower symmetry.