Diffusiophoresis of gold in silica driven by the nanometric interfacial layer

This paper describes a model to describe diffusiophoresis of a gold nanoparticle inside a solid silica substrate. The motion of the particle is powered by the flow of a liquid-silica interfacial layer due to a gradient of gold concentration inside this layer. This mechanism can help explain the experiments of de Vreede et al. [1] in which the authors observed that gold nanoparticles become engulfed into the solid silica substrate at high temperature. Indeed our model describes precisely their experimental measurement