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Employing classical isothermal molecular dynamics, we simulated coalescence of mesoscopic Au nanodroplets, containing from several thousands to several hundred thousands of atoms, and sintering of mesoscopic solid Au nanoparticles. For our atomistic simulations, we used the embedded atom method. The employed open access program large-scale atomic/molecular massively parallel simulator makes it possible to realize parallel graphical processing unit calculations. We have made a conclusion that the regularities and mechanisms of the nanodroplet coalescence (temperature is higher than the nanoparticle melting temperature) and of the solid nanoparticle sintering differ from each other. We have also concluded that the nanodroplet coalescence may be interpreted as a hydrodynamic phenomenon at the nanoscale whereas sintering of solid nanoparticles is a much more complex phenomenon related to different mechanisms, including collective rearrangements of atoms, the surface diffusion, and other types of diffusion. At the same time, collective rearrangements of atoms relate not only to the solid nanoparticle sintering but also to the nanodroplet coalescence. In general, our molecular dynamics results on sintering of Au nanoparticles consisting of 10 000–30 000 atoms agree with the Ferrando–Minnai kinetic trapping concept that was earlier confirmed in molecular dynamics experiments on Au nanoclusters consisting of about 100 atoms.

Using the isothermal molecular dynamics, coalescence/sintering of Au nanoparticles (NPs) was simulated. We have found that the solid NP sintering scenario is switched to the coalescence scenario not at the NP melting temperature T m exactly but at a lower temperature T 0 ≈ 0.9T m interpreted as the critical temperature corresponding to a coalescence/sintering bifurcation phenomenon: in the temperature range from T 0 – 2 K to T 0 + 2 K to the resulting (daughter) NPs of the same size can have either liquid-like or crystalline structure after coalescence/sintering at the same fixed temperature.

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