Energetics of pure and doped helium droplets - application to interpreting pick-up experiments

We use helium density functional theory to calculate the energies of spherically symmetric 4He helium droplets both with and without heteroatom dopants. Self-consistent calculations using an imaginary time propagation method are used to compute structural and energetic properties of these droplets ranging in size from 50 to 9500 atoms. Particular attention is given to the solvation energies of the resident dopant atoms, as these values play an important role in experimental superfluid helium calorimetry techniques. We also suggest a method of predicting new droplet size distributions following dopant pickup using the chemical potential values obtained from our calculations