publications by Stefano Curtarolo.

Papers Published

1. A. Q. Jiang and N. Awasthi and A. N. Kolmogorov and W. Setyawan and A. Borjesson and K. Bolton and A. R. Harutyunyan and S. Curtarolo, Theoretical study of the thermal behavior of free and alumina-supported Fe-C nanoparticles, Physical Review B, vol. 75 no. 20 (May, 2007) .
   (last updated on 2009/08/04)

   Abstract:
   The thermal behavior of free and alumina-supported iron-carbon nanoparticles is investigated via molecular-dynamics simulations, in which the effect of the substrate is treated with a simple Morse potential fitted to ab initio data. We observe that the presence of the substrate raises the melting temperature of medium and large Fe1-xCx nanoparticles (x=0-0.16, N=80-1000, nonmagic numbers) by 40-60 K; it also plays an important role in defining the ground state of smaller Fe nanoparticles (N=50-80). The main focus of our study is the investigation of Fe-C phase diagrams as a function of the nanoparticle size. We find that as the cluster size decreases in the 1.1-1.6-nm-diameter range, the eutectic point shifts significantly not only toward lower temperatures, as expected from the Gibbs-Thomson law, but also toward lower concentrations of C. The strong dependence of the maximum C solubility on the Fe-C cluster size may have important implications for the catalytic growth of carbon nanotubes by chemical-vapor deposition.