Elastic Properties of Nanowires

We present a model to study Young's modulus and Poisson's ratio of the composite material of amorphous nanowires. It is an extension of the model derived by two of us [Da Fonseca and Galvao, Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 175502 (2004)] to study the elastic properties of amorphous nanosprings. The model is based on twisting and tensioning a straight nanowire and we propose an experimental setup to obtain the elastic parameters of the nanowire. We used the Kirchhoff rod model to obtain the expressions for the elastic constants of the nanowire.