Zero photoemission from icosahedral superatoms
Yuta Suzuki, Mamoru Tanaka, Yoshi-ichi Suzuki, Akira Terasaki, Takuya Horio · arXiv: 2610.32031v1 · Summary page
Why cover this story this week?
Enough energy, but no escaping electron
Giving an electron enough energy to escape does not guarantee that light will eject it. Quantum transition probabilities can fall to a minimum at particular photon energies. A new preprint reports complete suppression of photoemission in artificial, nearly spherical clusters called superatoms, extending an effect previously reported only for atoms with an outermost s-type orbital.
The researchers observed a vanishing photoemission cross section in a silver–tungsten cluster and reproduced the behavior in theoretical simulations. Those simulations predicted similar suppression in other nearly spherical clusters; experiments on a silver–molybdenum counterpart supported that prediction. Because cluster composition and size can be varied systematically, the result offers a route to controlling whether light releases electrons—not just by changing its energy, but by designing the object that absorbs it.
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