No abstract

The controlled fabrication of well-ordered atomic-scale metallic contacts is of great interest: it is expected that the experimentally observed high percentage of point contacts with a conductance at noninteger multiples of the conductance quantum G0=2e2∕h in simple metals is correlated to defects resulting from the fabrication process. Here we demonstrate a combined electrochemical deposition and annealing method that allows the controlled fabrication of point contacts with preselectable integer quantum conductance. The resulting conductance measurements on silver point contacts are compared with tight-binding-like conductance calculations of modeled idealized junction geometries between two silver crystals with a predefined number of contact atoms.

No abstract

Biomolecular structure prediction remains an important challenge to biophysical chemistry. We recently developed an all‐atom free energy forcefield (PFF01) for protein structure prediction with stochastic optimization methods. We review recent studies, which demonstrated all‐atom folding of several proteins and summarize recent progress for in‐silico high‐throughput screening strategies for rational drug design, which are also based on the use of stochastic optimization methods to determine the conformation of the receptor‐ligand complex.