Magnetism in Coaxial Palladium Nanowires

While bulk palladium is non-magnetic, several recent studies have shown that magnetism can occur in hcp Pd films, fcc twinned Pd nanoparticles, and Pd atomic strands. These studies show that small changes in Pd atomic configurations can induce magnetic properties. This raises the question of whether nanoscale Pd structures in general are magnetic. In this work, we examine coaxial palladium nanowires in an effort to determine the most stable configurations and their magnetic properties. Relaxed nanowire structures are found using density functional calculations in the plane wave basis. In several metallic systems such as gold, coaxial nanowires have proven to be the lowest energy configurations for ultrathin (≤ 1 nm) nanowires. We consider magnetism in these structures as a function of diameter and coaxial configuration. These results are also compared to fcc and hcp Pd nanowires of comparable diameters. We find that the (6, 0) coaxial nanowire provides the most stable structure and exhibits a magnetic moment of 0.278 μB/atom.