Issue |
EPL
Volume 98, Number 1, April 2012
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | 16010 | |
Number of page(s) | 5 | |
Section | Condensed Matter: Structural, Mechanical and Thermal Properties | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1209/0295-5075/98/16010 | |
Published online | 12 April 2012 |
Self-healing of fractured one-dimensional brittle nanostructures
1
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Curtin University - Perth, WA 6845, Australia
2
School of Physics and Nuclear Energy Engineering, Beihang University - Beijing 100191, China
3
School of Aeronautics Science and Engineering, Beihang University - Beijing 100191, China
4
State Key Laboratory of Nonlinear Mechanics (LNM), Institute of Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing 100190, China
5
Department of Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong Kowloon, Hong Kong, China
6
School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering, University of Sydney Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia
7
School of Engineering, Brown University - Providence, RI 02912, USA
a
C.Lu@curtin.edu.au
b
bhwangqi@sina.com
Received:
9
February
2012
Accepted:
14
March
2012
Recent experiments have shown that fractured GaAs nanowires can heal spontaneously inside a transmission electron microscope. Here we perform molecular-dynamics simulations to investigate the atomic mechanism of this self-healing process. As the distance between two fracture surfaces becomes less than 1.0 nm, a strong surface attraction is generated by the electrostatic interaction, which results in Ga–As re-bonding at the fracture site and restoration of the nanowire. The results suggest that self-healing might be prevalent in ultrathin one-dimensional nanostructures under near vacuum conditions.
PACS: 62.23.Hj – Nanowires / 62.25.-g – Mechanical properties of nanoscale systems / 61.46.-W –
© EPLA, 2012
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