Influence of the packing effect on stability and transformation of nanoparticles embedded in random matrices

The compression of random hard sphere systems does not lead to the formation of iscosahedral short - range order. Instead, icosahedral clusters embedded in a hard sphere system with a medium packing fraction are not stable against densification and they dissolve with an increasing packing fraction. Random homogeneous hard sphere models with equal spheres transform into nanometre scale composites of face-centred cubic nanocrystals embedded in a dense random packed matrix when the mean packing fraction of 0.64 is exceeded.