Melting of Single-Walled Silicon Carbide Nanotubes: Density Functional Molecular Dynamics Simulation

Density functional molecular dynamics are used to study the melting behavior of single-walled SiC nanotubes. The melting of SiC nanotubes starts from the thermally activated Stone-Wales defects. The melting temperature is found to increase with the increasing diameter of nanotubes. The SiC nanotubes have a high melting temperature larger than 4000K as the diameter larger than 1.0nm, which indicates that the SiC nanotubes may be the best candidate of nanoscale electronic and optoelectronic devices under high temperatures.