Self-healing of fractured one-dimensional brittle nanostructures

Recent experiments have shown that fractured GaAs nanowires can heal spontaneously inside a transmission electron microscope. Here we perform molecular-dynamics simulations to investigate the atomic mechanism of this self-healing process. As the distance between two fracture surfaces becomes less than 1.0 nm, a strong surface attraction is generated by the electrostatic interaction, which results in Ga-As re-bonding at the fracture site and restoration of the nanowire. The results suggest that self-healing might be prevalent in ultrathin one-dimensional nanostructures under near vacuum conditions. © Europhysics Letters Association 2012.