Large deformation and amorphization of Ni nanowires under uniaxial strain: A molecular dynamics study

Molecular-dynamics simulations were employed to study deformations on nickel nanowires subjected to uniaxial strain at 300 K using a recently reported embedded-atom (many body) model potential. This embedded-atom model can reproduce exactly the experimental second-order and third-order elastic moduli as well as the phase stability, equation of state and phonon frequency spectra are also in good agreement with experiments. Strong influence was observed in the Young modulus and force constant due to surface effects when considering nanowires with different cross sections. Applying strain rates, from 0.05 to 15%ps^-1, we found elastic behavior up to 11.5% strain with corresponding stress of 9.4 GPa. At low strain rates (<0.05%ps^-1) the system passes through plastic deformations although keeping the crystalline structure. This ductile process is showed by several snapshots. At this low strain rate regime we observed that the nanowires shows superplasticity. For high strain rates (>~7%ps^-1) the system changes continuously from crystalline to amorphous phase. Although this amorphization occurs with no use of liquid quenching or introduction of chemical or physical disorder, so being a different and interesting process, the amorphous resulted is unstable. We studied this instability monitoring the recrystallization process.