Understanding the structure of the first atomic contact in gold
Entity
UAM. Departamento de Física de la Materia CondensadaPublisher
Springer New YorkDate
2013-05-29Citation
10.1186/1556-276X-8-257
Nanoscale Research Letters 8 (2013): 257
ISSN
1931-7573 (print); 1556-276X (online)DOI
10.1186/1556-276X-8-257Funded by
This work was supported by the Spanish government through grants FIS2010-21883, CONSOLIDER CSD2007-0010, Generalitat Valenciana through PROMETEO/2012/011, ACOMP/2012/127 and Feder funds from E.U.Editor's Version
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1556-276X-8-257Subjects
Electronic transport; Atomic size contacts; Mechanical annealing; Jump-to-contact phenomena; Jump-out-of-contact phenomena; Molecular dynamics simulations; Ab initio; DFT; FísicaRights
© 2013 Sabater et al.Abstract
We have studied experimentally jump-to-contact (JC) and jump-out-of-contact (JOC) phenomena in gold electrodes. JC can be observed at first contact when two metals approach each other, while JOC occurs in the last contact before breaking. When the indentation depth between the electrodes is limited to a certain value of conductance, a highly reproducible behaviour in the evolution of the conductance can be obtained for hundreds of cycles of formation and rupture. Molecular dynamics simulations of this process show how the two metallic electrodes are shaped into tips of a well-defined crystallographic structure formed through a mechanical annealing mechanism. We report a detailed analysis of the atomic configurations obtained before contact and rupture of these stable structures and obtained
their conductance using first-principles quantum transport calculations. These results help us understand the values of conductance obtained experimentally in the JC and JOC phenomena and improve our understanding of atomic-sized contacts and the evolution of their structural characteristics
Files in this item
Google Scholar:Sabater, Carlos
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Caturla, María José
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Palacios Burgos, Juan José
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Untiedt, Carlos
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