RESEARCH PAPER Welding of gold nanowires with different joining procedures J. Y. Guo • C. X. Xu • A. M. Hu • Z. L. Shi • F. Y. Sheng • J. Dai • Z. H. Li Received: 27 April 2011 / Accepted: 22 December 2011 / Published online: 22 January 2012 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012 Abstract Welding of single-crystal metallic nano- wires is likely to have an important role in the bottom- up fabrication of nanodevices. The welding effects of free ends of two single-crystal gold nanowires (Au– Au) were demonstrated by Monte Carlo simulations in this paper. The quantum corrected Sutton–Chen type many-body potential was used to model the metal– metal interactions. Metallic nanowires were first placed closely with head-to-head, head-to-side and side-to-side joining procedures. Two ends were suc- cessfully welded together to form a continuous nanowire by annealing at different temperatures. The welding effects of the different joining procedure with different temperatures were compared. Structures of the welded specimens were characterized by the common neighbor analysis technique. Variable atomic mobility, freedom and contacting angles may result in different bonding strengths in the three different configurations. The results showed that the joint structure welded at low temperature were similar to the cold welding without fusion meanwhile the molten phase was presented in the joint when processing at the high temperatures. Keywords Welding  Nanowire  Monte Carlo  Common neighbor analysis  Nanoscale assembling  Modeling and simulation Introduction Various kinds of semiconductor and metallic nano- wires (NWs) with interesting new mechanical, elec- trical, optical and thermal properties can now be routinely fabricated by physical and chemical methods (Hochbaum and Yang 2010; Bang and Suslick 2010; Yang et al. 2010; Barth et al. 2010), and manipulated at the nanoscale using a range of scanning probe-based methods (Tohmyoh and Fukui 2009; Peng et al. 2009; Lu et al. 2010). NWs are one of the fundamental building blocks for nanotechnology. One of the promising ways to rearrange and assemble NWs for the bottom-up construction, integration, and repair of nanoscale systems is to weld them. The importance of welding technologies for miniatured materials has been increased because these technologies are indis- pensable for nanodevices (Hu et al. 2010, 2009; J. Y. Guo  C. X. Xu (&)  Z. L. Shi  F. Y. Sheng  J. Dai  Z. H. Li State Key Laboratory of Bioelectronics, and Advanced Photonics Center, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, People’s Republic of China e-mail: xcxseu@seu.edu.cn J. Y. Guo  J. Dai  Z. H. Li College of Mathematics and Physics, Jiangsu University of Science and Technology, Zhenjiang 212001, People’s Republic of China A. M. Hu Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering, Centre for Advanced Material Joining, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West Waterloo, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1, Canada 123 J Nanopart Res (2012) 14:666 DOI 10.1007/s11051-011-0666-7