A simple sonochemical route was developed for the crystal growth of uniform silver nanoplates and ringlike gold nanocrystals in a N,N-dimethylformamide solution. The platelike structures were generated from the selective growth on different crystal planes in the presence of poly(vinylpyrrolidone) and the ultrasonic-assisted Ostwald ripening processes. The silver nanoplates in solution served as...

The precipitation and Ostwald ripening behaviour of V4C3 (plate shaped) particles during the tempering of a ternary Fe – C –V martensitic steel have been characterised and modelled, taking account of local equilibrium, the capillarity effect, and simultaneous cementite enrichment and dissolution. Particles of V4C3 are represented as parabolic cylinders of revolution, with the tip radius chosen ...

We study the qualitative behavior of a thermodynamically consistent two-phase Stefan problem with surface tension and with or without kinetic undercooling. It is shown that these problems generate local semiflows in well-defined state manifolds. If a solution does not exhibit singularities in a sense made precise herein, it is proved that it exists globally in time and its orbit is relatively c...

The LSW theory of Ostwald ripening concerns the time evolution of the size distribution of a dilute system of particles that evolve by diffusional mass transfer with a common mean field. We prove global existence, uniqueness and continuous dependence on initial data for measure-valued solutions with compact support in particle size. These results are established with respect to a natural topolo...

We study the electronic mechanisms underlying the induction and propagation of chirality in achiral molecules deposited on surfaces. Combined scanning tunneling microscopy and ab initio electronic structure calculations of Cu-phthalocyanines adsorbed on Ag(100) reveal the formation of chiral molecular orbitals in structurally undistorted molecules. This effect shows that chirality can be manife...

Water molecules strongly interact with freshly cleaved (011) surfaces of L-alanine single crystals at low relative humidity (below 10%) promoting diffusion of L-alanine molecules. Species mobility is enhanced above ~40% leading to the formation of two-dimensional islands with long-range order through Ostwald ripening. Scanning force microscopy experiments reveal that both, islands and terraces,...

The electrochemical method of synthesis of gold nanorods in micelles gives substrate solutions that upon spotting and heating on a transmission electron microscope (TEM) substrate result in the nucleation and growth of small gold nanoclusters of narrow size distribution. The size of the nanoclusters, and not their numbers, is found to increased with increasing final temperature to which the sub...