The work has been recently published on ACS Nano.

A work by Diana Nelli, El yakout El koraychy and Riccardo Ferrando of the Nanobiocomp group at DIFI (https://sites.google.com/view/nanobiocomp), in collaboration with research groups in Limoges (France) and Rome has revealed the complex solidification pathways of binary metallic nanodroplets by means of molecular dynamics simulations.

The simulations have shown that solidification can take place in two steps, as in AgCo and AgNi nanodroplets, or in one step, as in AgCu nanodroplets. In the first case, the two elements in the nanodroplet already separate in the liquid phase, so that th etwo parts solidify at different temperatures. In the second case, the two elements remain intermixed in the liquid, and solidify suddenly at the same temperature.

These pathways lead to significantly different structures of the final solid nanoparticles. Moreover, the authors developed a new analytical model to rationalize the size dependence of the solidification temperature.

Reference: Diana Nelli, El Yakout El Koraychy, Manuella Cerbelaud, Benoit Crespin, Arnaud Videcoq, Alberto Giacomello, and Riccardo Ferrando, ACS Nano 2022, https://doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.2c09741