Ab initio energy landscape of LiF clusters

A global search for possible LiF cluster structures is performed, up to (LiF)8. The method is based on simulated annealing, where all the energies are evaluated on the ab initio level. In addition, the threshold algorithm is employed to determine the energy barriers for the transitions among these structures, for the cluster (LiF)4, again on the ab initio level; and the corresponding tree graph is obtained.