Electromigration-induced directional steps towards the formation of single atomic Ag contacts

• Atasi Chatterjee,
• Christoph Tegenkamp and
• Herbert Pfnür

Beilstein J. Nanotechnol. 2020, 11, 680–687, doi:10.3762/bjnano.11.55

• 2e2/h [5][7]. Furthermore, conductance histograms of alkali metals and the direct comparison of conductance peak values with the magic numbers of cluster size suggest that the preferred electronic quantum modes influence the mechanically stable diameters [8][9]. This electronic shell effect was not

Lifetime analysis of individual-atom contacts and crossover to geometric-shell structures in unstrained silver nanowires

• Christian Obermair,
• Holger Kuhn and
• Thomas Schimmel

Beilstein J. Nanotechnol. 2011, 2, 740–745, doi:10.3762/bjnano.2.81

• structure data of silver, and the growth mechanism of the nanowires is discussed. Keywords: nanowires; quantum point contacts; shell effect; silver; Introduction Recently, the first transistor on the atomic scale was demonstrated and generated much interest [1][2][3][4][5]. This atomic-scale transistor

• , also called the geometric-shell effect, as illustrated in Figure 5. It can be expected that with increasing conductance, and consequently with increasing radius, the structure of the nanowires more and more tends to their crystallographic bulk structure. For silver this is an fcc structure with a

• maximum at about 5 G0. Furthermore, there is a maximum at about 6.7 G0 which indicates the transition to the geometric-shell effect (Figure 4). Number of conductance levels with level length greater than Δt as a function of Δt. The plot is given for two conductance levels: For the conductance range of 1