Fragmentation behavior of Gen clusters (2 ⩽ n ⩽ 33)

The lowest-energy structures of Ge2–Ge33 have been optimized using all-electron DFT method. The properties of the germanium clusters including binding energies, second order differences in energy, HOMO–LOMO gaps, and especially fragmentation energies and fragmentation behavior have been studied. Our calculation shows that the fragmentation products of Ge6, Ge7, and Ge10 clusters are abundant and appear frequently in fragmentation processes, which is consistent with the experimental observations.