Harvesting nucleating structures in nanoparticle crystallization: The example of gold, silver, and iron

The thermodynamics and kinetics of nanoparticle crystallization, as opposed to bulk phases, may be influenced by surface and size effects. We investigate the importance of such factors in the crystallization process of gold, silver, and iron nanodroplets using numerical simulations in the form of molecular dynamics combined with path sampling. This modeling strategy is targeted at obtaining representative ensembles of structures located at the transition state of the crystallization process. A structural analysis of the transition state ensembles reveals that both the average size and location of the critical nucleation cluster are influenced by surface and nanoscale size effects. Furthermore, we also show that transition state structures in smaller nanodroplets exhibit a more ordered liquid phase, and differentiating between a well-ordered critical cluster and its surrounding disordered liquid phase becomes less evident. All in all, these findings demonstrate that crystallization mechanisms in nanoparticles go beyond the assumptions of classical nucleation theory.