Importance of configurational contributions to the free energy of nanoclusters

An effective simulation method based on the Wang-Landau Monte Carlo algorithm is used in order to demonstrate the significance of the configurational contributions to the free energy of embedded nanoclusters. Starting from the most stable cluster configuration the simulation provides all geometrically different, but simply connected and sufficiently compact configurations of a nanocluster of a given size and the respective formation energies. The knowledge of these data allows the calculation of the free formation and free binding energy of the cluster at . The method is applied to coherent Cu clusters in bcc-Fe. It is shown that even at moderate temperatures the configurational contributions to the free formation and binding energy must not be neglected. The dependence of the monomer free binding energy on clusters size is found to change significantly with increasing temperature which has a considerable effect on the pathway of cluster evolution. Therefore, present investigations provide an essential contribution to the improvement of the input parameters for object kinetic Monte Carlo simulations and rate theory used in multi-scale simulations of the nanostructure evolution. The calculation scheme developed in this work is rather general and applicable to many types of embedded nanoclusters. Compared to the method of overlapping distributions hitherto used in some cases to determine the configurational part of the free energy the new method has major advantages. Various tests are performed in order verify the presented approach and to compare with the results of the other calculation procedure. A roadmap is proposed to include the vibrational contributions to the free energy of the clusters within the framework of the method employed in this work.