Dipartimento di Sistemi e Informatica New global optima for Morse clusters at ρ = 8

We recently discovered 5 new putative globally optimum configurations for Morse clusters at ρ = 8. This report contains some algorithmic details as well as the structures determined with our method. Methodology After the success obtained in solving minimum energy conformation problems for Lennard-Jones clusters (see [LS02] and [LS03]) we recently adapted our twophase monotonic basin-hopping strategy to the minimization of Morse molecular clusters. We recall that, given two particles, the pairwise Morse interaction between them is defined as v(r; ρ) = ( eρ(1−r) − 1 )2 − 1 where ρ is a parameter and r is the distance between the center of the two particles. A system consisting of N particles has a Morse potential given by