Mechanical Characterization of Zinc Oxide Nanowires

Semiconductor nanowires like zinc oxide nanowires are potential materials for future nanoscale sensors and actuators. Due to their unique length scale, they are expected to have length-scale dependent mechanical properties. In this paper, we report experimental investigations on the mechanical properties of zinc oxide nanowires. We have designed a MEMS test-bed for mechanical characterization of nanowires and use a microscale version of pick-and-place as a generic specimen preparation and manipulation technique. We performed experiments on zinc oxide nanowires inside a scanning electron microscope (SEM) and estimated the Young's modulus to be approximately 21 GPa and the fracture strain to vary from 5 % to 15 %.