Inelastic fingerprints of hydrogen contamination in atomic gold wire systems

Abstract

We present series of first-principles calculations for both pure and hydrogen contaminated gold wire systems in order to investigate how such impurities can be detected. We show how a single H atom or a single H2 molecule in an atomic gold wire will affect forces and Au-Au atom distances under elongation. We further determine the corresponding evolution of the low-bias conductance as well as the inelastic contributions from vibrations. Our results indicate that the conductance of gold wires is only slightly reduced from the conductance quantum G0=2e^2/h by the presence of a single hydrogen impurity, hence making it difficult to use the conductance itself to distinguish between various configurations. On the other hand, our calculations of the inelastic signals predict significant differences between pure and hydrogen contaminated wires, and, importantly, between atomic and molecular forms of the impurity. A detailed characterization of gold wires with a hydrogen impurity should therefore be possible from the strain dependence of the inelastic signals in the conductance.

arXiv comment5 pages, 3 figures, Contribution to ICN+T2006, Basel, Switzerland, July-August 2006

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Atomic Motion in Single H${}_2$ and D${}_2$ Molecule Junction Induced by Phonon Excitation
• Enabling Ab-Initio Molecular Dynamics under Bias: The CP2K+SMEAGOL Interface for Integrating Density Functional Theory and Non-Equilibrium Green Functions
• Electron transport signature of H${}_2$ dissociation on atomic gold wires
• Copper atomic contacts exposed to water molecules