Nanoscale mechanical behavior of individual semiconducting nanobelts

Nanobelts are a group of materials that have a rectangle-like cross section with typical widths of several hundred nanometers, width-to-thickness ratios of 5–10, and lengths of hundreds of micrometers. In this letter, nanoindentations were made in individual ZnO and SnO2 nanobelts by a cube corner diamond indenter. It is shown that the effect of indentation size is still obvious for indentation depths less than 50 nm. It is also demonstrated that nanomachining of nanobelts is possible using an atomic force microscope tip.