Grain refinement and partitioning of impurities in the grain boundaries of a colloidal polycrystal

Abstract

We study the crystallization of a colloidal model system in presence of secondary nanoparticles acting as impurities. Using confocal microscopy, we show that the nanoparticles segregate in the grain boundaries of the colloidal polycrystal. We demonstrate that the texture of the polycrystal can be tuned by varying independently the nanoparticle volume fraction and the crystallization rate, and quantify our findings using standard models for the nucleation and growth of crystalline materials. Remarkably, we find that the efficiency of the segregation of the nanoparticles in the grain-boundaries is determined solely by the typical size of the crystalline grains.

accepted for publication in Soft Matter

References in corpus (4)

• Freezing as a path to build complex composites
• Probing the equilibrium dynamics of colloidal hard spheres above the mode-coupling glass transition
• The equilibrium intrinsic crystal-liquid interface of colloids
• Cell size distribution in a random tessellation of space governed by the Kolmogorov-Johnson-Mehl-Avrami model: Grain size distribution in crystallization

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Deconstructing the glass transition through critical experiments on colloids
• Structure of nanoparticles embedded in micellar polycrystals
• Structural characterisation of polycrystalline colloidal monolayers in the presence of aspherical impurities
• Nucleation and growth of micellar polycrystals under time-dependent volume fraction conditions