On charged mesoscopic metallic bubbles

We investigate the existence of stable charged metallic bubbles using the s hell correction method. We find that for a given mesoscopic system of n ato ms of a given metal and q much less than n (positive) elementary charges, a metallic bubble turns out to have a lower total energy than a compact sphe rical cluster, whenever the charge number q is larger than a critical charg e number q,,. For a magic number (n-q) of free electrons, the spherical met allic bubble may become stable against fission.