Ballistic resistivity in aluminum nanocontacts

Abstract

One of the major industrial challenges is to profit from some fascinating physical features present at the nanoscale. The production of dissipationless nanoswitches (or nanocontacts) is one of such attractive applications. Nevertheless, the lack of knowledge of the real efficiency of electronic ballistic/non dissipative transport limits future innovations. For multi-valent metallic nanosystems -where several transport channels per atom are involved- the only experimental technique available for statistical transport characterization is the conductance histogram. Unfortunately its interpretation is difficult because transport and mechanical properties are intrinsically interlaced. We perform a representative series of semiclassical molecular dynamics simulations of aluminum nanocontact breakages, coupled to full quantum conductance calculations, and put in evidence a linear relationship between the conductance and the contact minimum cross-section for the geometrically favored aluminum nanocontact configurations. Valid in a broad range of conductance values, such relation allows the definition of a transport parameter for nanomaterials, that represents the novel concept of ballistic resistivity.

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Cited by in corpus (8)

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• Is Small Perfect? Size Limit to Defect Formation in Pyramidal Pt Nanocontacts
• Aluminium Nanowires: Influence of Work Hardening on Conductance Histograms
• Geometry Effects at Atomic-Size Aluminium Contacts
• Directional bonding explains high conductance values of atomic contacts in bcc metals