Atomistic study of double-wall copper nanotubes

Abstract

We have performed atomistic simulations for hypothetical helical double-wall Cu nanotubes. Our investigation on helical double-wall Cu nanotubes has revealed some physical properties that were not dealt within previous works that considered metal nanowires or nanotubes. Helical double-wall Cu nanotubes were stabilized into the polygonal double-wall structures by using the steepest descent method. The cohesive energies per atom for helical double-wall Cu nanotues were higher than that for the Cu bulk, and this implies the difficulty ill producing Cu nanotubes. MD simulations also showed that the hypothetical Cu nanotubes maintained initial structures at very low temperature below 150 K. As the temperature increased. nanotubes were clogged more and more and were transformed into nanowires.