a b s t r a c tPolymer or glass films impregnated with quantum dots (QDs) have potential applications for mesoscale stress/strain sensing in the interior of materials under mechanical loading. One requirement in the development of such nanocomposite sensor materials is the establishment of calibrated relations between shifts in the emission spectrum of QD systems and the input stress/strain on the composites. Here, we use a multiscale computational framework to quantify the strain-dependent blueshift in the emission spectrum of CdTe QDs uniformly distributed in a matrix material under loading of a range of strain triaxiality. The framework, which combines the finite element method, molecular dynamics simulations and the empirical tight-binding method, captures the QD/matrix interactions, possible deformationinduced phase transformations and strain-dependent band structures of the QDs. Calculations reveal that the response of the QDs is strongly dependent on state of input strain. Under hydrostatic compression, the blueshift increases monotonically with strain. Under compression with lateral/axial strain ratios between 0.0 and 0.5, the blueshift initially increases, reaches a peak at an intermediate strain, and subsequently decreases with strain. This trend reflects a competition between increases in the energy levels associated with the conduction and valence bands of the QDs. The deformation-induced blueshift is also found to be dependent on QD orientations. The averaged blueshift over all orientations for the composite under uniaxial strain condition explains the blueshift variation trend observed in laser-driven shock compression experiments. Based on the simulation result, guidelines for developing QD composites as stress/strain sensing materials are discussed.

ABSTRACT

Abstract. The atomic motion is coupled by the fast and slow components due to the high frequency vibration of atoms and the low frequency deformation of atomic lattice, respectively. A two-step approximate method was presented to determine the atomic slow motion. The first step is based on the change of the location of the cold potential well bottom and the second step is based on the average of the appropriate slow velocities of the surrounding atoms. The simple tensions of one-dimensional atoms and two-dimensional atoms were performed with the full molecular dynamics simulations. The conjugate gradient method was employed to determine the corresponding location of cold potential well bottom. Results show that our two-step approximate method is appropriate to determine the atomic slow motion under the low strain rate loading. This splitting method may be helpful to develop more efficient molecular modeling methods and simulations pertinent to realistic loading conditions of materials.