Monte Carlo simulation of gold nano-colloids aggregation morphologies on a heterogeneous surface

✍ Scribed by M. Bigerelle; H. Haidara; A. Van Gorp

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 990 KB
• Volume: 26
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0928-4931
• DOI: 10.1016/j.msec.2005.09.043

✦ Synopsis

After one hour immersion (adsorption) in nano-colloidal suspensions, mesoscopic (Am scale) aggregation networks of gold nanoparticles (25 nm) are formed on a methyl/amine terminated surface (CH 3 /NH 2 ) and followed by the substrate drying. A Monte Carlo simulation is then performed to model these patterns in microscopic scale. It is revealed that a two-state Pott-like model allows to reproduce these structures if some inactive sites are introduced at the interface between (CH 3 /NH 2 ) and Au nano-colloids. The purpose of this study is to estimate the number of inactive sites by an inverse method based on an original multi-fractal formalism. Multi-fractal measures are defined like the quantity of information contained at different scales in surface morphology. After, parameters are estimated to minimise the norm between the experimental multi-fractal and simulated spectra. The robustness of this multi-scale analysis is tested by a statistical bootstrap protocol that gives computing confidence intervals of the physical coefficients.