Changing shapes in the nanoworld
Materials Science
2009-10-31 v1 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics
Abstract
What are the mechanisms leading to the shape relaxation of three dimensional crystallites ? Kinetic Monte Carlo simulations of fcc clusters show that the usual theories of equilibration, via atomic surface diffusion driven by curvature, are verified only at high temperatures. Below the roughening temperature, the relaxation is much slower, kinetics being governed by the nucleation of a critical germ on a facet. We show that the energy barrier for this step linearly increases with the size of the crystallite, leading to an exponential dependence of the relaxation time.
Cite
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0005113,
title = {Changing shapes in the nanoworld},
author = {Nicolas Combe and Pablo Jensen and Alberto Pimpinelli},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0005113},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
4 pages, 5 figures. Accepted by Phys Rev Lett