Modeling surface energy in porous metallic nanostructures

In this work we estimate surface energy values in nanostructures, with the use of a tight-binding potential with the second moment approximation. We propose a model to calculate surface energy using differences in cohesive energy. Our model is fully atomistic, and we demonstrate it is a naturally suitable description of general crystalline solids, specially in the sub-micron range, where the precise notion of continuous surface area is compromised. In order to establish our method, we obtain results for nanosized structures of Cu, Au and Cu3Au.