Hydrodynamical approach to collective oscillations in metal clusters

In this Letter we present a hydrodynamical approach within the realm of time dependent density functional theory which is based on the particle and the current densities to calculate the excited state energies of many-electron systems. The applicability of the approach is demonstrated by calculating the collective oscillation frequencies of sodium clusters of various sizes within the spherical jellium background model. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.