Surface Kinetics of Nanoclusters

摘要

Surfaces are responsible for many unique features exhibited by the nanoclusters. Even though numerous theoretical and experimental studies have been done to understand the nature of free surfaces, much emphasis has not been put on understanding the dynamics of free boundaries at the fundamental atomistic scale of length and time. In the present work we use the techniques of molecular dynamics to filter out the dynamics of the boundaries from that of the entire nanocluster. We show that at a given thermodynamic temperature, the effective statistical temperature is different for the free boundaries. Despite this observation, the surface dynamics seems to be in strong correlation with the rest of the system. This uniqueness of the surface in terms of its kinetics is expected to be crucial in the phenomena of melting and mechanochemical synthesis.