A novel experimental scheme has been developed in order to measure the heat capacity of mass selected clusters. It is based on controlled sticking of atoms on clusters. This allows one to construct the caloric curve, thus determining the melting temperature and the latent heat of fusion in the case of first-order phase transitions. This method is model-free. It is transferable to many systems since the energy is brought to clusters through sticking collisions. As an example, it has been applied to and .
Voir en ligne : J. Chem. Phys. 129, 164514 (2008)