Low-dimensional systems are an important and intensely studied area of condensed matter physics. When a material is forced to adopt a low-dimensional structure, its behaviour is often dramatically different to that of the bulk phase. It is vital to predict the structures of low-dimensional systems in order to reliably predict their properties. To this end, the ab initio random structure searching (AIRSS) method, which has previously been used to identify the structures of bulk materials, has been extended to deal with the case of nanowires encapsulated inside carbon nanotubes. Such systems are a rapidly developing area of research with important nanotechnological applications, including information storage, energy storage and chemical sensing.

The extended AIRSS method for encapsulated nanowires (ENWs) was implemented and used to identify the structures formed by germanium telluride, silver chloride, and molybdenum diselenide ENWs. In each of these cases, a number of novel nanowire structures were identified, and a phase diagram predicting the ground state nanowire structure as a function of the radius of the encapsulating nanotube was calculated. In the case of germanium telluride, which is a technologically important phase-change material, the potential use of GeTe ENWs as switchable nanoscale memory devices was investigated. 

The vibrational properties of silver chloride ENWs were also considered, and a novel scheme was developed to predict the Raman spectra of systems which can be decomposed into multiple weakly interacting subsystems. This scheme was used to obtain a close approximation to the Raman spectra of AgCl ENWs at a fraction of the computational cost that would otherwise be necessary. The encapsulation of AgCl was shown to produce substantial shifts in the Raman spectra of nanotubes, providing an important link with experiment.

A method was developed to predict the stress-strain response of an ENW based on a polygonal representation of its surface, and was used to investigate the elastic response of molybdenum diselenide ENWs. This was used to predict stress-radius phase diagrams for MoSe$_2$ ENWs, and hence to investigate stress-induced phase change within such systems.

The X-ray diffraction of ENWs was also considered. A program was written to simulate X-ray diffraction in low-dimensional systems, and was used to predict the diffraction patterns of some of the encapsulated GeTe nanowire structures predicted by AIRSS. By modelling the interactions within a bundle of nanotubes, diffraction patterns for bundles of ENWs were obtained.