Related papers: Modeling contact formation between atomic-sized go…

Electrical contacts between nano-engineered systems are expected to constitute the basic building blocks of future nano-scale electronics. However, the accurate characterization and understanding of electrical contacts at the nano-scale is…

Controlling the shape and structure of metallic colloids is an important topic. Here, different morphology-structures of colloidal gold particles are investigated with different process parameters in a pulse-based electron-photon and…

Cluster-assembled metallic films show interesting electrical properties, both in the near-to-percolation regime, when deposited clusters do not form a complete layer yet, and when the film thickness is well above the electrical percolation…

Conductance histograms are a valuable tool to study the intrinsic conduction properties of metallic atomic-sized contacts. These histograms show a peak structure, which is characteristic of the type of metal under investigation. Despite the…

Nanowires of different nature have been shown to self-assemble as a function of stress at the contact between two macroscopic metallic leads. Here we demonstrate for gold wires that the balance between various metastable nanowire…

We use molecular dynamics simulations to study the evaporation of particle-laden droplets on a heated surface. The droplets are composed of a Lennard-Jones fluid containing rigid particles which are spherical sections of an atomic lattice,…

Gold nanoclusters have been the focus of numerous computational studies but an atomistic understanding of their structural and dynamical properties at finite temperature is far from satisfactory. To address this deficiency, we investigate…

Molecules with versatile functionalities and well-defined structures, can serve as building blocks for extreme nanoscale devices. This requires their precise integration into functional heterojunctions, most commonly in the form of…

The understanding and modeling of the heat transport across nanometer and sub-nanometer gaps where the distinction between thermal radiation and conduction become blurred remains an open question. In this work, we present a…

By employing a real-space formulation of the Kubo-Greenwood equation based on a Green's function embedding technique combined with the fully relativistic spin-polarized Korringa-Kohn-Rostoker method a detailed investigation of the…

The conducting and thermodynamic properties of ballistic metallic nanocontacts with smooth shapes are investigated. All properties are related to the electronic scattering matrix, which is evaluated in the WKB approximation for independent…

We examine the conductance properties of a chain of Na atoms between two metallic leads in the limit of low bias. Resonant states corresponding to the conductance channel and the local charge neutrality condition cause conductance…

The point contact of a tunnel tip approaching towards Ag(111) and Cu(111) surfaces is investigated with a low temperature scanning tunneling microscope. A sharp jump-to-contact, random in nature, is observed in the conductance. After point…

A simple and highly reproducible technique is demonstrated for the fabrication of metallic electrodes with nanometer separation. Commercially available bare gold colloidal nanoparticles are first trapped between prefabricated…

Understanding and mastering the mechanical properties of metallic nanoparticles is crucial for their use in a wide range of applications. In this context, we use atomic-scale (Molecular Dynamics) and continuous (Finite Elements)…

A detailed computational analysis has been performed, considering copper atomic contacts that are exposed directly to water molecules, hydroxyl groups, and monatomic as well as molecular hydrogen and oxygen species. The optimized physical…

We present a theoretical study of the electronic transport through Pt nanocontacts. We show that the analysis of the tunnelling regime requires a very careful treatment of the technical details. For instance, an insufficient size of the…

Molecular electronics break-junction experiments are widely used to investigate fundamental physics and chemistry at the nanoscale. Reproducibility in these experiments relies on measuring conductance on thousands of freshly formed…

We calculate the effect of electron-vibration coupling on conduction through atomic gold wires, which was measured in the experiments of Agra\"it et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 216803 (2002)]. The vibrational modes, the coupling constants,…

Applying ac voltages, we trapped gold nanoparticles between microfabricated electrodes under well-defined conditions. We demonstrate that the nanoparticles can be controllably fused together to form homogeneous gold nanowires with…