Freezing of gold nanoclusters into poly-decahedral structures

A new family of cluster structures is found by molecular dynamics freezing simulations of gold nanoclusters in the 2 - 4 nm size range. These clusters are poly-decahedra, characterized by having several fivefold symmetry axes, each surrounded by a local decahedral arrangement. This family includes as a subset the bi-decahedral particles recently observed in experiments among gold nanoparticles frozen from liquid, and this leads to a comparison between experimental and simulated structural distributions.