The controlled fabrication of well-ordered atomic-scale metallic contacts is of great interest: it is expected that the experimentally observed high percentage of point contacts with a conductance at non-integer multiples of the conductance quantum G_0 = 2e^2/h in simple metals is correlated to defects resulting from the fabrication process. Here we demonstrate a combined electrochemical deposition and annealing method which allows the controlled fabrication of point contacts with pre-selectable integer quantum conductance. The resulting conductance measurements on silver point contacts are compared with tight-binding-like conductance calculations of modeled idealized junction geometries between two silver crystals with a predefined number of contact atoms.
@article{arxiv.0807.3866,
title = {Pre-selectable integer quantum conductance of electrochemically fabricated silver point contacts},
author = {F. -Q. Xie and R. Maul and S. Brendelberger and Ch. Obermair and E. B. Starikov and W. Wenzel and G. Schoen and Th. Schimmel},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0807.3866},
year = {2009}
}