Exploring the effects of different immersion environments on the growth of gold nanostructures

Even though Au crystallizes only as a simple FCC structure in bulk there have been many different and fascinating structures discovered experimentally for Au on the nanoscale. Unfortunately, for Au a direct ab-initio approach in studying dynamic growth mechanisms of nanostructures is prohibitively expensive from a computational perspective, so here we use methods based on accurate semi-empirical, many-body potentials whose parameters are obtained from a combination of empirical and ab-initio data as a viable alternative. We show that this method when combined with molecular dynamics may be used to simulate the growth of Au particles in a bath of solvent atoms (either in a gaseous or liquid state) which results in structures of a range of different morphologies. An analysis of the results indicates what characteristics of the solvent and its interactions are important in determining these different morphologies.