Morphology of nanostructured films synthesized via electrodeposition

In this study we perform Brownian dynamics simulations to investigate the influence of surface reaction rate on the development of size dispersion of interfacial nanostructures that form by electrodeposition of non-interacting ions (particles) onto surfaces with randomly distributed nucleation sites. The surface reaction rate is incorporated into the simulations by using a reaction probability that approaches unity in the case of instantaneous, diffusion-limited deposition. It is found that the size uniformity of the growing particles on the randomly distributed active sites can be improved by decreasing the reaction probability. The simulation results, in qualitative agreement with experiments, show that decreasing the reaction probability is an effective means to weaken the interparticle diffusion coupling by reducing the overlap of diffusion zones surrounding the nanoparticles, and thereby reduce the particle size dispersion.