Critical Dispersion Distance of Silicon Nanoparticles Intercalated between Graphene Layers
Figure 2
(a)–(e) the morphologic evolution of the Si NP-graphene system over simulation time. For visual clarity, only the bottom graphene layer and the Si NPs are shown. When the distance between the two Si NPs is sufficiently large (here nm, and = 37 nm), the two Si NPs remain dispersed and are wrapped individually by the graphene bilayer. The corrugated graphene morphology near each Si NP is similar to that shown in Figure 1. (f)–(j) when the distance between the two Si NPs is below a critical value (here nm, and = 25 nm), the two Si NPs evolve to come closer and eventually bundle together. (Supplemental materials: two videos showing the morphologic evolution of the Si NP-graphene system corresponding to (a)–(e) and (f)–(j) are available at http://ter.ps/dispersed and http://ter.ps/bundled, resp., available online at doi: 10.1155/2012/375289).
