Stability of polycrystalline and wurtzite Si nanowires via symmetry-adapted tight-binding objective molecular dynamics

The stability of the most promising ground state candidate Si nanowires with less than 10 nm in diameter is comparatively studied with objective molecular dynamics coupled with nonorthogonal tight-binding and classical potential models. The computationally expensive tight-binding treatment becomes tractable due to the substantial simplifications introduced by the presented symmetry-adapted scheme. It indicates that the achiral polycrystalline of fivefold symmetry and the wurtzite wires of threefold symmetry are the most favorable quasi-one-dimensional Si arrangements. Quantitative differences with the classical model description are noted over the whole diameter range. Using a Wulff energy decomposition approach it is revealed that these differences are caused by the inability of the classical potential to accurately describe the interaction of Si atoms on surfaces and strained morphologies.