When mechanisms of coalescence and sintering at the nanoscale fundamentally differ: Molecular dynamics study.

Employing classical isothermal molecular dynamics, we simulated coalescence of mesoscopic Au nanodroplets, containing from several thousands to several hundred thousands of atoms, and sintering of mesoscopic solid Au nanoparticles. For our atomistic simulations, we used the embedded atom method. The employed open access program large-scale atomic/molecular massively parallel simulator makes it possible to realize parallel graphical processing unit calculations.