Systematics of liquid helium clusters

Abstract

The properties of 3He and 4He clusters are investigated in the framework of a density functional approach. We find that 4He clusters are always bound and do not exhibit any shell effect. Conversely, 3He clusters require a minimum number of atoms (Nmin≂30) to ensure binding. 3He clusters are found to exhibit harmonic oscillator type shell effects associated with the magic numbers N=1/3 (m+1)(m+2)(m+3) (with m integer)=40,70,112,168,... and single particle energy gaps of the order of 0.2–0.4 K.