Local density functional study of copper clusters: A comparison between real clusters, model surface clusters, and the actual metal surface

Density Functional Theory is used to study the influence of the size of copper clusters modeling the Cu(100) surface, on the electronic properties: ionization potential, electron affinity, electronic chemical potential, and chemical hardness. The model clusters are chosen to have a bilayer structure and range in size from 9 to 20 copper atoms. The chemical hardness being identified as the relaxation energy of the frontier levels when an electron is removed or added to the system, a simple expression is proposed to estimate its value from the eigenenergies of the frontier levels in neutral and partially ionized systems. A detailed comparison of the geometric and electronic structures is made between the model surface copper clusters, real copper clusters, and the actual metal surface; it is seen that the model surface clusters provide an easy extrapolation to the properties of the metal surface.