Fig. 3: Nucleation and growth of monolayer salt nanostructures.

Time-dependent distributions of ion cluster size (left panels, a, h) and representative snapshots (right panels, b–g and i–n) for 2D monolayer NaCl and LiCl nanostructures in dilute solutions. The definition of ion clusters is based on a distance criterion (i.e., an ion belongs to a cluster when its distance to any ion in the cluster is less than 0.35 nm).