Approaching the ideal elastic strain limit in silicon nanowires
In our new paper published on Science Advances, we carefully measured the elastic mechanical properties of individual silicon nanowires by uniaxial tensile straining under both SEM and high-res optical microscope, and demonstrated that high quality VLS–grown single-crystalline Si nanowires with diameters of ~100 nm can be reversibly stretched at room temperature with 10% or more elastic strain, approaching the theoretical limit of silicon.