The growth of charged platelets.

Growth models of charged nanoplatelets are investigated with Monte Carlo simulations and simple theory. In a first model, 2-dimensional simulations in the canonical ensemble are used to demonstrate that the growth of a single weakly charged platelet could be limited by its own internal repulsion. The short range attractive interaction in the crystal is modeled with a square well potential while the electrostatic interactions are described with a screened Coulomb potential. The qualitative behavior of this case can also be described by simply balancing the attractive crystal energy with the screened Coulomb repulsion between the crystal sites. This repulsion is a free energy term dominated b…