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Nonequilibrium Kinetic Modeling of Sintering of a Layer of Dispersed Nanocrystals

We report a kinetic Monte Carlo modeling study of nanocrystal layer sintering. Features that are of interest for the dynamics of the layer as a whole, especially the morphology of the evolving structure, are considered. It is found that the kinetics of sintering is not entirely a local process, with the layer morphology affected by the kinetics in a larger than few-particle neighborhood. Consideration of a single layer of particles makes the numerics manageable and allows visualization of the results, as well as numerical simulations of several realizations for statistical averaging of properties of interest. We identify optimal regimes for sintering, considering several particle size distributions and temperature control protocols.