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Metal nanoparticles of multi-principal element alloys (MPEA) with a single crystalline phase have been synthesized by flash heating/cooling of nanosized metals encapsulated in micelle vesicles dispersed in an oil phase (e.g., cyclohexane). Flash heating is realized by selective absorption of a microwave pulse in metals to rapidly heat metals into uniform melts. The oil phase barely absorbs microwave and maintains the low temperature, which can rapidly quench the high-temperature metal melts to enable the flash cooling process. The precursor ions of four metals, including Au, Pt, Pd, and Cu, can be simultaneously reduced by hydrazine in the aqueous solution encapsulated in the micelle vesicles. The resulting metals efficiently absorb microwave energy to locally reach a temperature high enough to melt themselves into a uniform mixture. The duration of microwave pulse is crucial to ensure the reduced metals mix uniformly, while the temperature of oil phase is still low to rapidly quench the metals and freeze the single-phase crystalline lattices in alloy nanoparticles. The microwave-enabled flash heating/cooling provides a new method to synthesize single-phase MPEA nanoparticles of many metal combinations when the appropriate water-in-oil micelle systems and the appropriate reduction reactions of metal precursors are available. 

The involvement of heterogeneous solid/liquid reactions in growing colloidal nanoparticles makes it challenging to quantitatively understand the fundamental steps that determine nanoparticles' growth kinetics. A global optimization protocol relying on simulated annealing fitting and the LSW growth model is developed to analyze the evolution data of colloidal silver nanoparticles synthesized from a microwave-assisted polyol reduction reaction. Fitting all data points of the entire growth process determines with high fidelity the diffusion coefficient of precursor species and the heterogeneous reduction reaction rate parameters on growing silver nanoparticles, which represent the principal functions to determine the growth kinetics of colloidal nanoparticles. The availability of quantitative results is critical to understanding the fundamentals of heterogeneous solid/liquid reactions, such as identifying reactive species and reaction activation energy barriers.