English

Free-electron Model for Mesoscopic Force Fluctuations in Nanowires

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2009-10-30 v2

Abstract

When two metal electrodes are separated, a nanometer sized wire (nanowire) is formed just before the contact breaks. The electrical conduction measured during this retraction process shows signs of quantized conductance in units of G_0=2e^2/h. Recent experiments show that the force acting on the wire during separation fluctuates, which has been interpreted as being due to atomic rearrangements. In this report we use a simple free electron model, for two simple geometries, and show that the electronic contribution to the force fluctuations is comparable to the experimentally found values, about 2 nN.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/9711219,
  title  = {Free-electron Model for Mesoscopic Force Fluctuations in Nanowires},
  author = {S. Blom and H. Olin and J. L. Costa-Kramer and N. Garcia and M. Jonson and P. A. Serena and R. I. Shekhter},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/9711219},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

4 pages, 3 figures, reference corrected