Mechanical annealing of metallic electrodes at the atomic scale

Abstract

The process of creating an atomically defined and robust metallic tip is described and quantified using measurements of contact conductance between gold electrodes and numerical simulations. Our experiments show how the same conductance behavior can be obtained for hundreds of cycles of formation and rupture of the nanocontact by limiting the indentation depth between the two electrodes up to a conductance value of approximately $5G_0$ in the case of gold. This phenomenon is rationalized using molecular dynamics simulations together with density functional theory transport calculations which show how, after repeated indentations (mechanical annealing), the two metallic electrodes are shaped into tips of reproducible structure. These results provide a crucial insight into fundamental aspects relevant to nano-tribology or scanning probe microscopies.

References in corpus (3)

• Theoretical analysis of the conductance histograms and structural properties of Ag, Pt and Ni nanocontacts
• Single atom adhesion in optimized gold nanojunctions
• Mechanical, Electrical, and Magnetic Properties of Ni Nanocontacts

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Robust procedure for creating and characterizing the atomic structure of scanning tunneling microscope tips
• Modeling Single Molecule Junction Mechanics as a Probe of Interface Bonding
• Highly reproducible low temperature scanning tunnelling microscopy and spectroscopy with in situ prepared tips
• Analysis of the Kondo effect in ferromagnetic atomic-sized contacts
• Modeling contact formation between atomic-sized gold tips via molecular dynamics