Metal clusters second-order energy difference

A precise theoretical and experimental determination of polarizability would provide an important probe of the electronic structure of clusters, as a is very sensitive to the presence of low-energy optical excitations. Accurate experimental data for a wide range of size-selected clusters are available only for sodium, potassium [104] and aluminum [105, 106]. Theoretical predictions based on DFT and realistic models do not cover even this limited sample of experimental data. The reason for this scarcity is that the evaluation of polarizability by the sum rule (46) requires the preliminary computation of S(co), which, with the exception of Ref. [101], is available only for idealized models. Two additional routes exist to the evaluation of a, in close analogy with the computation of vibrational properties static second-order perturbation theory and finite differences [107]. Again, the first approach has been used exclusively for the spherical jellium model. In this case, the equations to be solved are very similar to those introduced in Ref. [108] for the computation of atomic polarizabilities. Applications of this formalism to simple metal clusters are reported, for instance, in Ref. [109]. 

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