Related papers: Shell-effects in heavy alkali-metal nanowires
After making a cold weld by pressing two clean metal surfaces together, upon gradually separating the two pieces a metallic nanowire is formed, which progressively thins down to a single atom before contact is lost. In previous experiments…
We extend our previous shell effect observation in gold nanowires at room temperature under ultra high vacuum to the other two noble metals: silver and copper. Similar to gold, silver nanowires present two series of exceptionally stable…
We report experiments on aluminum nanowires in ultra-high vacuum at room temperature that reveal a periodic spectrum of exceptionally stable structures. Two "magic" series of stable structures are observed: At low conductance, the formation…
Experimental conductance histograms for Na nanowires are analyzed in detail and compared to recent theoretical results on the stability of cylindrical and elliptical nanowires, using the free-electron model. We find a one-to-one…
The quantum states of a system of particles in a finite spatial domain in general consist of a set of discrete energy eigenvalues; these are usually grouped into bunches of degenerate or close-lying levels, called shells. In fermionic…
The formation of gold nanowires in vacuum at room temperature reveals a periodic spectrum of exceptionally stable diameters. This is identified as shell structure similar to that which was recently discovered for alkali metals at low…
Electron Spin Resonance and optical reflectivity measurements demonstrate a metal-insulator transition in Na_2CsC_60 as the system passes from the low temperature simple cubic to the high temperature {\it fcc} structure above 300 K. The…
We study the electronic properties (density of states, conductivity and thermopower) of some nearly--free--electron systems: the liquid alkali metals and two liquid alloys, Li-Na and Na-K. The study has been performed within the…
Accurate modeling of transition metal-containing compounds is of great interest due to their wide-ranging and significant applications. These systems present several challenges from an electronic structure perspective, including significant…
A unique property of metal nanoclusters is the "superatom" shell structure of their delocalized electrons. The electronic shell levels are highly degenerate and therefore represent sharp peaks in the density of states. This can enable…
A stability analysis of metal nanowires shows that a Jahn-Teller deformation breaking cylindrical symmetry can be energetically favorable, leading to stable nanowires with elliptic cross sections. The sequence of stable cylindrical and…
Alkali metals display unexpected properties at high pressure, including emergence of low symmetry crystal structures, that appear to occur due to enhanced electronic correlations among the otherwise nearly-free conduction electrons. We…
Collisions with chemically inert atoms or molecules change the hyperfine coupling of an alkali-metal atom through the hyperfine-shift interaction. This interaction is responsible for the pressure shifts of the microwave resonances of…
We systematically measured the Hall effect in the extremely large magnetoresistance semimetal WTe$_2$. By carefully fitting the Hall resistivity to a two-band model, the temperature dependencies of the carrier density and mobility for both…
We study the proximity effect in a one-dimensional nanowire strongly coupled to a finite superconductor with a characteristic size which is much shorter than its coherence length. Such geometries have become increasingly relevant in recent…
Motivated by recent experiments on Al nanoparticles, we have studied the effects of fixed electron number and small size in nanoscale superconductors, by applying the canonical BCS theory for the attractive Hubbard model in two and three…
Specific heat, resistivity, susceptibility and Hall coefficient measurements were performed on high-quality single crystalline Na$_{1-\delta}$FeAs. This compound is found to undergo three successive phase transitions at around 52, 41, and…
We investigate the influence of hydrogen on the electronic structure of a binary transition metallic glass of V$_{80}$Zr$_{20}$. We examine the hybridization between the hydrogen and metal atoms with the aid of hard x-ray photoelectron…
Using all atom molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, we have studied the mechanical properties of ZnS/CdS core/shell nanowires. Our results show that the coating of a few atomic layer CdS shell on the ZnS nanowire leads to a significant…
An analysis of the evolutionary trends in the ground state geometries of Na$_{55}$ to Na$_{62}$ reveals Na$_{58}$, an electronic closed--shell system, shows namely an electronically driven spherical shape leading to a disordered but compact…