Nonequilibrium Kinetic Modeling of Sintering of a Layer of Dispersed Nanocrystals

TL;DR

This study uses kinetic Monte Carlo simulations to analyze the sintering process of nanocrystal layers, revealing non-local effects on morphology and identifying optimal sintering conditions across different particle sizes and temperature protocols.

Contribution

It introduces a kinetic Monte Carlo model for nanocrystal layer sintering that accounts for non-local effects and explores optimal sintering regimes.

Findings

Sintering kinetics are influenced by larger than local neighborhoods.

Layer morphology depends on non-local kinetic effects.

Optimal sintering regimes vary with particle size and temperature protocols.

Abstract

We report a kinetic Monte Carlo modeling study of nanocrystal layer sintering. Features that are of interest for the dynamics of the layer as a whole, especially the morphology of the evolving structure, are considered. It is found that the kinetics of sintering is not entirely a local process, with the layer morphology affected by the kinetics in a larger than few-particle neighborhood. Consideration of a single layer of particles makes the numerics manageable and allows visualization of the results, as well as numerical simulations of several realizations for statistical averaging of properties of interest. We identify optimal regimes for sintering, considering several particle size distributions and temperature control protocols.