Modeling of superheating and undercooling of strained semiconductor nanocrystals in SiO2

Abstract

Although superheating and undercooling of nanocrystals have been observed and simply modeled, physical aspects of the nanocrystals, like strain, have previously been ignored. In this article the size dependence of the melting and solidification point temperature of semiconductor nanocrystals embedded in an interface epitaxy free matrix is modeled, taking into account the strain state of the nanocrystals. A configurational entropy term is introduced to render the model applicable to any crystal size, including bulk. The model is validated on the system of InSb nanocrystals embedded in SiO2 under a high compressive strain.