Crystallization of nickel nanoclusters by molecular dynamics

Abstract

We investigated the melting properties of bulk nickel and the crystallization of nickel nanocrystals via molecular dynamics using a potential in the framework of the second moment approximation of tight-binding theory. The melting behavior was simulated with the hysteresis approach by subsequently heating and cooling gradually the system over a wide range of temperatures. The crystallization of nickel nanoclusters consisting of 55, 147 and 309 atoms was achieved after repeatedly annealing and quenching the corresponding quasicrystals several times to avoid being trapped in a local energy minimum. The time over which the global minimum was reached was found to increase with the cluster size.