Stability and Symmetry Breaking in Metal Nanowires
Abstract
A general linear stability analysis of simple metal nanowires is presented using a continuum approach which correctly accounts for material-specific surface properties and electronic quantum-size effects. The competition between surface tension and electron-shell effects leads to a complex landscape of stable structures as a function of diameter, cross section, and temperature. By considering arbitrary symmetry-breaking deformations, it is shown that the cylinder is the only generically stable structure. Nevertheless, a plethora of structures with broken axial symmetry is found at low conductance values, including wires with quadrupolar, hexapolar and octupolar cross sections. These non-integrable shapes are compared to previous results on elliptical cross sections, and their material-dependent relative stability is discussed.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0608373,
title = {Stability and Symmetry Breaking in Metal Nanowires},
author = {D. F. Urban and J. Bürki and C. A. Stafford and Hermann Grabert},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0608373},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
12 pages, 4 figures