Evolution of plasmonic and hybrid photoionization properties of alkaline earth metallofullerenes with the increasing fullerene size

A theoretical study of the photoionization of endohedral fullerenes with a selection of fullerene molecules of increasing size and with confined alkaline earth atoms like Be and Mg is carried out. The fullerene ion cores, comprised of C$^{4+}$ ions, are smudged into a continuous jellium charge distribution, while the delocalized cloud of carbon valence electrons plus the electrons of the encaged atom are treated in the Kohn-Sham local density approximation (LDA) [1]. Only the spherical geometry is considered. The photoionization spectra are calculated by the time-dependent LDA that includes essential electron correlations [1]. A systematic evolution of the mixing of valence atomic levels with states of fullerene single-electron bands is found along the sequence. This hybridization as a function of the fullerene size is seen to primarily define the properties of the subshell-differential ionization spectra both in the low energy plasmonic as well as the high energy oscillatory regions.\\[4pt] [1] M.E. Madjet, T. Renger, D.E. Hopper, M.A. McCune, H.S. Chakraborty, J.-M. Rost, and S.T. Manson, \textit{Phys. Rev. }A \textbf{81}, 013202 (2010).