Vapor–Liquid–Solid (VLS) Nanowire Growth

Nanomanufacturing at the atomic scale often means growing structures atom by atom rather than carving them out of bulk material. This simulator recreates the vapor–liquid–solid mechanism used to grow semiconductor nanowires: an array of molten gold catalyst droplets of different sizes sits on a substrate, each absorbing vapor-phase precursor atoms and crystallizing a nanowire underneath itself in real time. The Gibbs–Thomson effect means droplets below a critical radius r꜀ are self-limited and never grow at all, while larger droplets race ahead — exactly the size-selection behaviour that lets real nanomanufacturing processes set nanowire diameter just by choosing catalyst particle size. Tune the vapor supersaturation, growth temperature and catalyst size spread and watch the critical radius and growth-rate readouts respond live.