Anomalous thermal relaxation in carbon nanoclusters

By employing molecular dynamics simulations, we study thermal relaxation in two types of nanoclusters, a cubelike stack of identical carbon nanotubes and a nanocube of fullerene C₆₀ molecules. We calculate relaxation time and coefficient of thermal conductivity and reveal that the C₆₀ nanocluster demonstrates anomalously slow thermal relaxation due to the excitation of long-lived internal localized oscillatory modes. This suggests that such nanoclusters would be the most efficient for photophoretic manipulation of fullerenes.