A unified treatment of the cohesive and conducting properties of metallic nanostructures in terms of the electronic scattering matrix is developed. A simple picture of metallic nanocohesion in which conductance channels act as delocalized chemical bonds is derived in the jellium approximation. Universal force oscillations of order epsilon_F/lambda_F are predicted when a metallic quantum wire is stretched to the breaking point, which are synchronized with quantized jumps in the conductance.
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/9709031,
title = {Jellium model of metallic nanocohesion},
author = {C. A. Stafford and D. Baeriswyl and J. Burki},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/9709031},
year = {2008}
}
Comments
7 pages, Latex, 3 figures, to be published in Phys.Rev.Lett