# A thermodynamic model for the melting of supported metal nanoparticles

## TL;DR

This paper develops a thermodynamic model to understand how supported metal nanoparticles melt, revealing that melting temperature equivalence with free particles depends on contact angles, aligning with recent simulation findings.

## Contribution

The paper introduces a simple thermodynamic model that explains the melting behavior of supported metal nanoparticles, accounting for surface curvature and contact angles, and compares it with molecular dynamics results.

## Key findings

- Melting temperature matches free particles when contact angles are similar.
- Surface melting onset depends on contact angle differences.
- Model aligns with recent molecular dynamics simulation results.

## Abstract

We construct a simple thermodynamic model to describe the melting of a supported metal nanoparticle with a spherically curved free surface both with and without surface melting. We use the model to investigate the results of recent molecular dynamics simulations, which suggest the melting temperature of a supported metal particle is the same as that of a free spherical particle with the same surface curvature. Our model shows that this is only the case when the contact angles of the supported solid and liquid particles are similar. This is also the case for the temperature at which surface melting begins.