The ultra-cold 4He droplet-assisted synthesis and deposition of embedded metal nanoparticles (NPs) on solid surfaces, originally proposed by Vilsesov's group [1], attracts nowadays strong attention [1-5]. This is due to both the exciting fundamental physics revealed via the technique, including earlier traces of quantum vorticity in superfluid 4He droplets [1,5], and the potential applications in nanoscience and nanotechnology [2,3]. For instance, it can be exploited to induce the formation of ultrathin wires of metal NPs [1,5] with special special electro-, magneto-optical, and catalytic properties. To control the metal NPs film formation, it is important to understand the basic mechanism regulating the 4He droplet-mediated deposition of the metal NPs and their subsequent diffusion and aggregation. Of course, this process is much influenced by the specific He-metal, He-surface, and surface-metal interactions so that their accurate descriptions is a prerequisite for realistic first-principles simulations. The first focus of this talk will be on an ab-initio-grounded scheme to van der Waals-dominated adsorbate-surface interactions [6-9,11], with application to the He-surface [7,8,11] and silver-surface systems [9]. Next, we will discuss the dispersionless and dispersion-accounting (time-dependent) density functional and molecular dynamics simulations of 4He droplets at impact with graphene and TiO2(110) surfaces [8,10,11]. Finally, theoretical evidences for the 4He droplet-assisted-sticking of an embedded metal atom at very low landing energies will be presented [11].

International conference on Quantum Fluid Clusters, QFC2015, June 7th to June 11th, 2015 at the University Paul Sabatier in Toulouse, France; http://qfc2015.sciencesconf.org/

Peer Reviewed