Atomic-size oscillations in conductance histograms for gold nanowires and the influence of work hardening.

Aluminium Nanowires: Influence of Work Hardening on Conductance Histograms

Ab initio study of evolution of mechanical and transport properties of clean and contaminated Au nanowires along the deformation path

We present a first-principles study of the evolution of the mechanical and transport properties of clean and contaminated Au nanowires during the whole breaking process. We combine density functional theory total energy calculations and Keldysh Green’s function methods in order to determine the changes in the structure and conductance induced by the presence of hydrogen and oxygen atomic impuri...

Fractional conductance in hydrogen-embedded gold nanowires.

Interaction of the physically adsorbed molecular hydrogen with a breaking gold nanowire results in additional stable atomic configurations in few atom contacts and appearance of fractional peaks in the conductance histogram. This effect is explained by peculiar dynamic evolution of the hydrogen-embedded nanoconstriction due to competition between tensile and capillary forces. Dimerization withi...

Statistics of quantum transport in metal nanowires with surface disorder

Experimental conductance histograms built from several thousand successive breakings of sodium nanowires 1,2 exhibit peaks up to rather high conductance values (∼ 100× 2e/h). In this paper, we present results from a disordered free-electron model of a metallic nanowire, which was previously successful in describing both conductance histograms and shot noise measurements in gold nanocontacts wit...

Structure and conductance histogram of atomic-sized Au contacts

Many experiments have shown that the conductance histograms of metallic atomic-sized contacts exhibit a peak structure, which is characteristic of the corresponding material. The origin of these peaks still remains as an open problem. In order to shed some light on this issue, we present a theoretical analysis of the conductance histograms of Au atomic contacts. We have combined classical molec...