Related papers: Kondo Conductance in an Atomic Nanocontact from Fi…
Low-temperature electronic conductance in nanocontacts, scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), and metal break junctions involving magnetic atoms or molecules is a growing area with important unsolved theoretical problems. While the detailed…
The effect of magnetic impurities on the ballistic conductance of nanocontacts is, as suggested in recent work, amenable to ab initio study \cite{naturemat}. Our method proceeds via a conventional density functional calculation of spin and…
Molecular contacts are generally poorly conducting because their energy levels tend to lie far from the Fermi energy of the metal contact, necessitating undesirably large gate and bias voltages in molecular electronics applications.…
Atomic contacts made of ferromagnetic metals present zero-bias anomalies in the differential conductance due to the Kondo effect. These systems provide a unique opportunity to perform a statistical analysis of the Kondo parameters in…
Iron, cobalt and nickel are archetypal ferromagnetic metals. In bulk, electronic conduction in these materials takes place mainly through the $s$ and $p$ electrons, whereas the magnetic moments are mostly in the narrow $d$-electron bands,…
The nonlinear conductance observed in a quantum point contact is theoretically reproduced for the entire range of applied bias. The single-impurity Anderson model with two reservoirs at different chemical potentials is studied for a…
Recently, different experiments on the transport through atomic-sized contacts made of ferromagnetic materials have produced contradictory results. In particular, several groups have reported the observation of half-integer conductance…
We study the impact of dynamical correlations on the electronic structure and coherent transport properties of Cu nanocontacts hosting a single magnetic impurity (Ni,Co,Fe) in the contact region. The strong dynamical correlations of the…
The Fano-Kondo effect in zero-bias conductance is investigated based on a theoretical model for the T-shaped quantum dot. The conductance as a function of the gate voltage is generally characterized by a Fano asymmetric parameter q. With…
The zero-temperature magnetic field-dependent conductance of electrons through a one-dimensional non-interacting tight-binding chain with an interacting {\it side} dot is reviewed and analized further. When the number of electrons in the…
With the goal to elucidate the nature of spin-dependent electronic transport in ferromagnetic atomic contacts, we present here a combined experimental and theoretical study of the conductance and shot noise of metallic atomic contacts made…
The transmission of electrons through a non-interacting tight-binding chain with an interacting side quantum dot (QD) is analized. When the Kondo effect develops at the dot the conductance presents a wide minimum, reaching zero at the…
Stable organic radicals integrated into molecular junctions represent a practical realization of the single-orbital Anderson impurity model. Motivated by recent experiments for perchlorotriphenylmethyl (PTM) molecules contacted to gold…
Quantum point contacts exhibit mysterious conductance anomalies in addition to well known conductance plateaus at multiples of 2e^2/h. These 0.7 and zero-bias anomalies have been intensively studied, but their microscopic origin in terms of…
Magnetic impurities bridging nanocontacts and break junctions of nearly magnetic metals may lead to permanent moments, analogous to the giant moments well known in the bulk case. A numerical renormalization group (NRG) study shows that,…
Quantum point contacts (QPCs) and quantum dots (QDs), two elementary building blocks of semiconducting nanodevices, both exhibit famously anomalous conductance features: the 0.7-anomaly in the former case, the Kondo effect in the latter.…
The tip of a low-temperature scanning tunneling microscope is brought into contact with individual Kondo impurities (cobalt atoms) adsorbed on a Cu(100) surface. A smooth transition from the tunneling regime to a point contact with a…
In this thesis we study electron transport through magnetic nanocontacts and nanowires with ab initio quantum transport calculations. The aim is to gain a thorough understanding of the interplay between electrical conduction and magnetism…
The zero bias conductance of quantum dots coupled to ferromagnetic leads is investigated. In the strong coupling regime, it is found that the conductance is a non-monotonic function of the angle between the magnetisation directions in the…
The connection of electrical leads to wire-like molecules is a logical step in the development of molecular electronics, but also allows studies of fundamental physics. For example, metallic carbon nanotubes are quantum wires that have been…