Deformation of Top-Down and Bottom-Up Silver Nanowires

I wanted to share some our work on the deformation behavior of metal nanowires that was recently published in Advanced Functional Materials. In this work, we considered the tensile deformation of three experimentally observed silver nanowire geometries, including five-fold twinned, pentagonal nanowires. The manuscript abstract and urls to videos of the tensile deformation of the three nanowire geometries are below. A copy of the manuscript is attached.

Rhombic Nanowire | Truncated-Rhombic Nanowire | Pentagonal Nanowire

Abstract

We employ atomistic simulations to probe the deformation behavior of experimentally observed top-down and bottom-up FCC silver nanowires. We consider stable, <110> oriented nanowires with a rhombic and truncated-rhombic cross section, representative of top-down geometries, as well as the multiply twinned pentagonal nanowire that is commonly fabricated in a bottom-up approach. We simulate the tensile deformation from a stable, experimentally observed structure to failure for each nanowire structure. A detailed, mechanistic explanation of the initial defect nucleation is provided for each nanowire. The three geometries are shown to exhibit different levels of strength and to deform by a range of mechanisms depending on the nanowire structure. In particular, the deformation behavior of top-down and bottom-up nanowires is shown to be fundamentally different. The yield strength of nanowires ranging from 1-25 nanometers in diameter is provided and reveals that in addition to cross sectional diameter, the strength of nanowires is strongly tied to the structure. This study demonstrates that nanowire structure and size may be tailored for specific mechanical requirements in nanometer scale devices.