Thinning process and conductance histograms of electromigrated gold nanojunctions

Regina Hoffmann-Vogel

Universität Karlsruhe, Physikalisches Institut, Karlsruhe, Germany

We investigate nanocontact formation by thermally assisted electromigration of gold nanowires. Automatic feed-back allows to follow a line of constant dissipated power at the nanocontact up to resistances corresponding to 10 to 20 conductance quanta. The contacts are thinned in a controlled way by voltage induced heating. In the ballistic regime, oscillations of the conductance histogrammes show that the material properties of the nanocontacts are similar to work-hardened gold.

Back