On the proximity relation between two surface-melted clusters involved in inter-cluster mass transfer

We explore the way free particles produced by dissociating “particle-hole pairs” on a surface-melted cluster can be transferred to a second, nearby surface-melted cluster. This mass transport is based on an inter-cluster direct transfer mechanism of the particles. We found that in this particular case one cluster may grow at the expense of another, obeying a temporal power law with the exponent 1/2 for the average radius (R∼t ^1/2). The change from the expected universal power law (R∼t ^1/3) is a consequence of the proximity relation between these two clusters which lead to enhance the effective transport rates. Received 4 December 2000