Size-Dependent Room Temperature Oxidation of In Nanoparticles

Using transmission electron microscopy, we study the size-dependent room-temperature oxidation of indium nanoparticles. From the investigation of arrays of In nanoparticles with broad size distribution, we evaluate, under identical conditions, the In2O3 thickness as a function of size at a given time. The results of our measurements are in excellent agreement with predictions for a Mott-Cabrera model corrected for a spherically symmetric electric field and directly demonstrate the accelerated oxidation kinetics of nanoscale particles with high curvature. We show that the size-dependent oxidation kinetics of nanoparticles can be probed by considering polydisperse arrays of nanoparticles as snapshots of the oxidation kinetics of differently sized particles.