Morphological Evolution of Fractal Dendritic Silver Induced by Ions Walking within the Diffusion Layer

Fractal dendritic morphologies will be formed when metal materials are synthesized in nonequilibrium conditions. In the past, scientists mainly studied the effect of noise and anisotropy on morphology evolution. However, in this Article, fractal dendritic silver is synthesized through a simple wet-chemical method, spontaneous galvanic displacement between Ag ions and Zn plate, and through Monte Carlo simulation we found that walking of ions within the diffusion layer can affect the morphology of the whole shape, and anisotropy only affects the shape in local area. As the longitudinal velocity of silver ions walking within the diffusion layer increases, the ions are more easily distributed on the hollow part of fractal silver, and thus the fractal silver will transform from loose fractal (LF) to dense branch morphology (DBM), and shape densities and fractal dimensions of fractal morphologies also increase.