Abstract The effect of thermal shape fluctuations on the recurrent fluorescence of boron-cluster cations, BN+ (N=9–14), has been investigated numerically, with a special emphasis on B13+. For this cluster, the electronic structures of the ground state and the four lowest electronically excited states were calculated using time-dependent density-functional theory and sampled on molecular dynamics trajectories of the cluster calculated at an experimentally relevant excitation energy.
