Nanowires made of zinc oxide are highly anelastic—meaning they return to shape slowly after being bent, rather that snapping right back.
The findings suggest that the nanowires—tiny strands thousands of times thinner than a human hair—are good at dissipating kinetic energy and could be used to absorb shocks and vibrations.
“What’s surprising here is the magnitude of the effect,” says Huajian Gao, professor of engineering at Brown University and a coauthor of a new paper in Nature Nanotechnology.
“Anelasticity is present but negligible in many macroscale materials, but becomes prominent at the nanoscale. We show an anelastic effect in nanowires that is four orders of magnitude larger than what is observed in even the most anelastic bulk materials.”
