Nanometer-Scale Metallic Grains Connected with Atomic-Scale Conductors

Abstract

We describe a technique for connecting a nanometer-scale gold grain to leads by atomic-scale gold point contacts. These devices differ from previous metallic quantum dots in that the conducting channels are relatively well-transmitting. We investigate the dependence of the Coulomb blockade on contact resistance. The high-resistance devices display Coulomb blockade and the low-resistance devices display a zero-bias conductance dip, both in quantitative agreement with theory. We find that in the intermediate regime, where the sample resistance is close to $h/e^2$, the I-V curve displays a Coulomb staircase with symmetric contact capacitances.

Submitted to Journal of Applied Physics

References in corpus (7)

• Spectroscopy of discrete energy levels in ultrasmall metallic grains
• Coulomb Blockade without Tunnel Junctions
• Spectroscopy, Interactions and Level Splittings in Au Nanoparticles
• Coulomb blockade oscillations of conductance in the regime of strong tunneling
• Direct link between Coulomb blockade and shot noise in a quantum coherent structure
• Strong Electron Tunneling through Mesoscopic Metallic Grains
• Strong Tunneling and Coulomb Blockade in a Single-Electron Transistor

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Kondo Effect in Electromigrated Gold Break Junctions
• Localization and Capacitance Fluctuations in Disordered Au Nano-junctions
• Suppression of Spin-Orbit Scattering in Strong-Disordered Gold Nanojunctions
• Dimensionality effects on non-equilibrium electronic transport in Cu nanobridges
• Spin-Based Magnetofingerprints and Dephasing in Strongly Disordered Au-Nanobridges