In this paper the influence of adsorbed hydrogen on the behavior of gold nanojunctions is investigated. It is found, that the hydrogen environment has a strong effect on the conductance of atomic-sized gold junctions, which is markedly reflected by the growth of an additional peak in the conductance histogram at 0.5 quantum unit, 2e^2/h. The statistical analysis of the conductance traces implies that the new peak arises due to the hydrogen-assisted distortion of atomic gold chains.
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0404171,
title = {Hydrogen-assisted distortion of gold nanowires},
author = {A. Halbritter and Sz. Csonka and G. Mihaly and O. I. Shklyarevskii and S. Speller and H. van Kempen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0404171},
year = {2007}
}