Understanding the structure of the first atomic contact in gold |
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Authors: | Carlos Sabater María José Caturla Juan José Palacios Carlos Untiedt |
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Affiliation: | 1.Departmento de Física Aplicada, Universidad de Alicante, Carretera San Vicente del Raspeig, Alicante 03690, Spain;2.Departamento de Física de la Materia Condensada, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid 24105, Spain |
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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. |
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Keywords: | Electronic transport Atomic size contacts Mechanical annealing Jump-to-contact phenomena Jump-out-of-contact phenomena Molecular dynamics simulations Ab initio DFT |
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