Thin gold wires often used in high-end electronic applications are wonderfully flexible as well as conductive. But those qualities don’t necessarily apply to the same wires at the nanoscale. A new study from Rice University finds gold wires less than 20 nanometers wide can become “brittle-like” under stress. It appears in the journal Advanced Functional Materials. The paper by Rice materials scientist Jun Lou and his lab shows in microscopic detail what happens to nanowires under the kinds of strain they would reasonably undergo in, for instance, flexible electronics.
