The role of Joule heating in the formation of nanogaps by electromigration

Abstract

We investigate the formation of nanogaps in gold wires due to electromigration. We show that the breaking process will not start until a local temperature of typically 400 K is reached by Joule heating. This value is rather independent of the temperature of the sample environment (4.2-295 K). Furthermore, we demonstrate that the breaking dynamics can be controlled by minimizing the total series resistance of the system. In this way, the local temperature rise just before break down is limited and melting effects are prevented. Hence, electrodes with gaps < 2 nm are easily made, without the need of active feedback. For optimized samples, we observe quantized conductance steps prior the gap formation.

including 7 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Measurement of the conductance of a hydrogen molecule
• Controlled Fabrication of Nanogaps in Ambient Environment for Molecular Electronics
• Metal-nanoparticle single-electron transistors fabricated using electromigration
• Kondo Effect in Electromigrated Gold Break Junctions
• The Kondo Effect in the Presence of Magnetic Impurities
• Temperature Control of Electromigration to form Gold Nanogap Junctions

Cited by in corpus (16)

• Signatures of Molecular Magnetism in Single-Molecule Transport Spectroscopy
• Electromigrated nanoscale gaps for surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy
• Quantum phase transition in a single-molecule quantum dot
• Tuning the Kondo effect with a mechanically controllable break junction
• Tunneling Spectra of Individual Magnetic Endofullerene Molecules
• Feedback controlled electromigration in four-terminal nano-junctions
• Quantized Conductance and Switching in Percolating Nanoparticle Films
• Controlled formation of metallic nanowires via Au nanoparticle ac trapping
• Feedback-controlled electromigration for the fabrication of point contacts
• Scanning probe microscopy imaging of metallic nanocontacts
• Scaling of 1/f noise in tunable break-junctions
• Out-of-equilibrium singlet-triplet Kondo effect in a single C_60 quantum dot
• Two-dimensional simulations of temperature and current-density distribution in electromigrated structures
• Effect of quantized conductivity on the anomalous photon emission radiated from atomic-size point contacts
• Pre-determining the location of electromigrated gaps by nonlinear optical imaging
• Kondo effects in a C_60 single-molecule transistor