Related papers: Is there Ballistic Conductance Quantization in Rea…
One of the major industrial challenges is to profit from some fascinating physical features present at the nanoscale. The production of dissipationless nanoswitches (or nanocontacts) is one of such attractive applications. Nevertheless, the…
Recent experiments on atomic-scale metallic contacts have shown that the quantization of the conductance appears clearly only after the average of the experimental results. Motivated by these results we have analyzed a simplified model…
Multiwalled carbon nanotubes are shown to be ballistic conductors at room temperature, with mean free paths of the order of tens of microns. These experiments follow and extend the original experiments by Frank et al (Science, 280 1744…
The electrical transport properties of atomic-scale conductors are reviewed, with an emphasis on the relations of this problem with studies on quantum size effects in metallic clusters. A brief introduction is given of the natural formalism…
Contacting metallic single-walled carbon nanotubes by palladium (Pd) affords highly reproducible ohmic contacts and allows for detailed elucidation of ballistic transport in metallic nanotubes. The Pd ohmic contacts are more reliable than…
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…
The continuing miniaturization of microelectronics raises the prospect of nanometre-scale devices with mechanical and electrical properties that are qualitatively different from those at larger dimensions. The investigation of these…
To develop next-generation electronics and high efficiency energy-harvesting devices, it is crucial to understand how charge and heat are transported at the nanoscale. Metallic atomic-size contacts are ideal systems to probe the quantum…
Atomic-sized lead (Pb) contacts are deposited and dissolved in an electrochemical environment, and their transport properties are measured. Due to the electrochemical fabrication process, we obtain mechanically unstrained contacts and…
We study the transport properties of a three dimensional atomic-scale contact in the ballistic regime. The results for the conductance and related transmission eigenvalues show how the properties of the ideal semi-infinite leads (i.e.…
Electronic transport properties of bismuth nanocontacts are analyzed by means of a low temperature scanning tunneling microscope. The subquantum steps observed in the conductance versus elongation curves give evidence of atomic…
We present an experimental determination of the conduction channel distribution in lead nanoscale contacts with total conductances ranging from 1 to 15 G0, where G0=2e2/h. It is found that even for contacts having a cross section much…
We introduce a new quantum transport formalism based on a map of a real 3-dimensional lead-conductor-lead system into an effective 1-dimensional system. The resulting effective 1D theory is an in principle exact formalism to calculate the…
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…
Using the Boltzmann transport model, we show that, somewhat unintuitively, ballistic transport of electrons in metals is weaker than diffusive transport. This happens because the femtosecond-scale collision rates of the non-thermal…
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…
On a microscopic scale, resistivity during electric conduction is caused by collisions of the free conduction electrons with the obstructing atoms or molecules of the conductor material, resulting in heat production. Based on this…
Transport properties of metal-molecule-metal junctions containing monolayer of conjugated and saturated molecules with characteristic dimensions in the range of 30-300 nm are correlated with microscopic topography, stress and chemical…
The electrical conductance of atomic metal contacts represents a powerful tool to detect nanomagnetism. Conductance reflects magnetism through anomalies at zero bias -- generally with Fano lineshapes -- due to the Kondo screening of the…
We calculate the current and electrostatic potential drop in metallic carbon nanotube wires self-consistently, by solving the Green's function and electrostatics equations in the ballistic case. About one tenth of the applied voltage drops…