MERGING NANOWIRES BREAKAGE RESULTS FOR DIFFERENT STRETCHING DIRECTIONS TO COMPARE WITH EXPERIMENTAL ONES

During the last two decades, the study of the properties of nanowires has been one of the keystones of the development of nanotechnology since these nanoobjects exhibit electrical and mechanical properties of interest in fundamental knowledge as well as technological applications [1]. In particular, many experimental studies of electrical and mechanical properties of metallic nanowires have been addressed in order to describe the quantum features appearing due to electron transversal confinement. The standard approximation for the experimental study of such metallic nanowires includes the formation, elongation and breakage of ultranarrow nanocontacts, as for instance, those formed between an STM tip and a metallic surface. With the advent of powerful computational resources and realistic descriptions of the atomic interactions, it has been possible to reproduce many of such formation-breaking experiments “in silicon ” [2]. An important part of these simulation studies have been done using Molecular Dynamics (MD) algorithms, allowing to elucidate how this formation-elongation-breakage occurs. Furthermore MD simulations allow us to determine the kind of structures that appear during the final stages of the breaking process. Getting insight of such structures is a crucia