No Arabic abstract
We use our recently proposed accelerated dynamics algorithm (Tiwary & van de Walle, 2011) to calculate temperature and stress dependence of activation free energy for surface nucleation of dislocations in pristine Gold nanopillars under realistic loads. While maintaining fully atomistic resolution, we achieve the fraction of a second time-scale regime. We find that the activation free energy depends significantly on the driving force (stress or strain) and temperature, leading to very high activation entropies. We also perform compression tests on Gold nanopillars for strain rates varying between 7 orders of magnitudes, reaching as low as 10^3/s. Our calculations show the quantitative effects on the yield point of unrealistic strain-rate Molecular Dynamics calculations: we find that while the failure mechanism for <001> compression of Gold nanopillars remains the same across the entire strain-rate range, the elastic limit (defined as stress for nucleation of the first dislocation) depends significantly on the strain-rate. We also propose a new methodology that overcomes some of the limits in our original accelerated dynamics scheme (and accelerated dynamics methods in general). We lay out our methods in sufficient details so as to be used for understanding and predicting deformation mechanism under realistic driving forces for various problems.
Molecular dynamics simulations are performed to investigate the role of a coherent {Sigma}3 (111) twin boundary on the plastic deformation behavior of Cu nanopillars. Our work reveals that the mechanical response of pillars with and without the twin boundary is decisively driven by the characteristics of initial dislocation sources. In the condition of comparably large pillar size and abundant initial mobile dislocations, overall yield and flow stresses are controlled by the longest, available mobile dislocation. An inverse correlation of the yield and flow stresses with the length of the longest dislocation is established, and its extrapolation agrees well with experimental yield stress data. The experimentally reported subtle differences in yield and flow stresses between pillars with and without the twin boundary are thus likely related to the maximum lengths of the mobile dislocations. In the condition of comparably small pillar size, for which a reduction of mobile dislocations during heat treatment and mechanical loading occurs, the mechanical response of pillars with and without the twin boundary can be clearly distinguished. Dislocation starvation during deformation is more clearly present in pillars without the twin boundary than in pillars with the twin boundary because the twin boundary acts as a pinning surface for the dislocation network.
Due to high viscosity, glassy systems evolve slowly to the ordered state. Results of molecular dynamics simulation reveal that the structural ordering in glasses becomes observable over experimental (finite) time-scale for the range of phase diagram with high values of pressure. We show that the structural ordering in glasses at such conditions is initiated through the nucleation mechanism, and the mechanism spreads to the states at extremely deep levels of supercooling. We find that the scaled values of the nucleation time, $tau_1$ (average waiting time of the first nucleus with the critical size), in glassy systems as a function of the reduced temperature, $widetilde{T}$, are collapsed onto a single line reproducible by the power-law dependence. This scaling is supported by the simulation results for the model glassy systems for a wide range of temperatures as well as by the experimental data for the stoichiometric glasses at the temperatures near the glass transition.
The ballistic performance of electron transport in nanowire transistors is examined using a 10 orbital sp3d5s* atomistic tight-binding model for the description of the electronic structure, and the top-of-the-barrier semiclassical ballistic model for calculation of the transport properties of the transistors. The dispersion is self consistently computed with a 2D Poisson solution for the electrostatic potential in the cross section of the wire. The effective mass of the nanowire changes significantly from the bulk value under strong quantization, and effects such as valley splitting strongly lift the degeneracies of the valleys. These effects are pronounced even further under filling of the lattice with charge. The effective mass approximation is in good agreement with the tight binding model in terms of current-voltage characteristics only in certain cases. In general, for small diameter wires, the effective mass approximation fails.
As impermeable to gas molecules and at the same time transparent to high-energy ions, graphene has been suggested as a window material for separating a high-vacuum ion beam system from targets kept at ambient conditions. However, accumulation of irradiation-induced damage in the graphene membrane may give rise to its mechanical failure. Using atomistic simulations, we demonstrate that irradiated graphene even with a high vacancy concentration does not show signs of such instability, indicating a considerable robustness of graphene windows. We further show that upper and lower estimates for the irradiation damage in graphene can be set using a simple model.
The Mg-Zn and Al-Zn binary alloys have been investigated theoretically under static isotropic pressure. The stable phases of these binaries on both initially hexagonal-close-packed (HCP) and face-centered-cubic (FCC) lattices have been determined by utilizing an iterative approach that uses a configurational cluster expansion method, Monte Carlo search algorithm, and density functional theory (DFT) calculations. Based on 64-atom models, it is shown that the most stable phases of the Mg-Zn binary alloy under ambient condition are $rm MgZn_3$, $rm Mg_{19}Zn_{45}$, $rm MgZn$, and $rm Mg_{34}Zn_{30}$ for the HCP, and $rm MgZn_3$ and $rm MgZn$ for the FCC lattice, whereas the Al-Zn binary is energetically unfavorable throughout the entire composition range for both the HCP and FCC lattices under all conditions. By applying an isotropic pressure in the HCP lattice, $rm Mg_{19}Zn_{45}$ turns into an unstable phase at P$approx$$10$~GPa, a new stable phase $rm Mg_{3}Zn$ appears at P$gtrsim$$20$~GPa, and $rm Mg_{34}Zn_{30}$ becomes unstable for P$gtrsim$$30$~GPa. For FCC lattice, the $rm Mg_{3}Zn$ phase weakly touches the convex hull at P$gtrsim$$20$~GPa while the other stable phases remain intact up to $approx$$120$~GPa. Furthermore, making use of the obtained DFT results, bulk modulus has been computed for several compositions up to pressure values of the order of $approx$$120$~GPa. The findings suggest that one can switch between $rm Mg$-rich and $rm Zn$-rich early-stage clusters simply by applying external pressure. $rm Zn$-rich alloys and precipitates are more favorable in terms of stiffness and stability against external deformation.