Enhanced flexibility and electron-beam-controlled shape recovery in alumina-coated Au and Ag core-shell nanowires.

The proper choice of coating materials and methods in core-shell nanowire (NW) engineering is crucial to assuring improved characteristics or even new functionalities of the resulting composite structures. In this paper, we have reported electron-beam-induced reversible elastic-to-plastic transition in Ag/AlO and Au/AlO NWs prepared by the coating of Ag and Au NWs with AlO by low-temperature atomic layer deposition. The observed phenomenon enabled freezing the bent core-shell NW at any arbitrary curvature below the yield strength of the materials and later restoring its initially straight profile by irradiating the NW with electrons.