Elastic behavior of crystalline/amorphous core/shell silicon nanowires

摘要

Using atomistic simulations, we study the elastic properties of silicon nanowires with amorphous shells. These structures were simulated by heating the perfect crystalline nanowires followed by rapid quenching. Virtual straining experiments exhibited a linear stress-strain behavior, which was further used to extract the Young's moduli of the nanowires. Simulations were carried out for nanowires of different diameters and shell thicknesses. We found that increase in the core-diameter resulted in enhanced stiffness constant. This trend could be explained by a simple composite model. Furthermore, the computations suggested that the core-shell interface did not have any pronounced effect on the Young's modulus of the nanowires.