Atomic-Sized Metallic Contacts: Mechanical Properties and Electronic Transport
- 25 March 1996
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Physical Society (APS) in Physical Review Letters
- Vol. 76 (13), 2302-2305
- https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.76.2302
Abstract
Measuring simultaneously the force and the conductance during the formation and rupture of an atomic-sized gold contact at room temperature, we observe that deformation occurs as a sequence of structural transformations involving elastic and yielding stages and that force and conductance before rupture have definite values which are likely to correspond to a single atom contact. We measure the mechanical properties of contacts consisting of only a few atoms and show that the stepwise variation of the conductance is always due to the atomic rearrangements in the contact.Keywords
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