Size matters as nanocrystals go through phases

(Phys.org) —Understanding what happens to a material as it undergoes phase transformations – changes from a solid to a liquid to a gas or a plasma – is of fundamental scientific interest and critical for optimizing commercial applications. For metal nanocrystals, assumptions about the size-dependence of phase transformations were made that now need to be re-evaluated. A team of researchers at the DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has demonstrated that as metal nanocrystals go through phase transformations, size can make a much bigger difference than previously believed.

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