No abstract

We present a computational approach for the simulation of extended x-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS) spectra of nanoparticles directly from molecular dynamics simulations without fitting any of the structural parameters of the nanoparticle to experimental data. The calculation consists of two stages. First, a molecular dynamics simulation of the nanoparticle is performed and then the EXAFS spectrum is computed from "snapshots" of structures extracted from the simulation. A probability distribution function approach calculated directly from the molecular dynamics simulations is used to ensure a balanced sampling of photoabsorbing atoms and their surrounding scattering atoms while keeping the number of EXAFS calculations that need to be performed to a manageable level. The average spectrum from all configurations and photoabsorbing atoms is computed as an Au L 3 -edge EXAFS spectrum with the FEFF 8.4 package, which includes the self-consistent calculation of atomic potentials. We validate and apply this approach in simulations of EXAFS spectra of gold nanoparticles with sizes between 20 and 60Å. We investigate the effect of size, structural anisotropy, and thermal motion on the gold nanoparticle EXAFS spectra and we find that our simulations closely reproduce the experimentally determined spectra.

We present a computational study by density functional theory (DFT) of entire silicon nanorods with up to 1648 atoms without any periodicity or symmetry imposed. The nanorods have been selected to have varying aspect ratios and levels of surface passivation with hydrogen. The structures of the nanorods have been optimized using a density functional tight-binding approach, while energies and electronic properties have been computed using linear-scaling DFT with plane-wave accuracy with the ONETEP (Skylaris et al 2005 J. Chem. Phys. 122 084119) program. The aspect ratio and surface passivation (1×1 and 2×1 reconstructions) along with the size of the nanorods which leads to quantum confinement along all three dimensions, significantly affect their electronic properties. The structures of the nanorods also show interesting behaviour as, depending on their characteristics, they can in certain areas retain the structure of bulk silicon while in other parts significantly deviate from it.

In recent work, a new method for using the outputs of molecular dynamics simulations to generate enhanced inputs for EXAFS analysis of nanoparticles was reported. Although currently limited to the first coordination shell, the method was demonstrated to improve both the quality of the fit, and the cross-correlation of the EXAFS data with that from TEM and XRD. Here we discuss further the justifications behind this assertion.