Atom Transfer and Single-Adatom Contacts

Limot, L.; Kröger, J.; Berndt, Richard; García-Lekue, Aran; Hofer, Werner A.

doi:10.1103/physrevlett.94.126102

Cited by 208 publications

(205 citation statements)

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“…SnPc-up and SnPc-up-2H, which are more weakly bonded to the surface, exhibit a rather abrupt tunneling-to-contact transition. A similar behavior was reported for adsorbed Ag and Cu atoms [19]. The different chemical bondings may also explain the local maxima observed in conductance curves of SnPc-up-nH (n ¼ 0; 2) and of SnPc-down-2H.…”

Section: Prl 104 176802 (2010) P H Y S I C a L R E V I E W L E T T Esupporting

confidence: 57%

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Atomic-Scale Control of Electron Transport through Single Molecules

et al. 2010

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Section: Prl 104 176802 (2010) P H Y S I C a L R E V I E W L E T T Esupporting

confidence: 57%

“…Molecules were evaporated from a heated crucible and deposited onto the sample surface at room temperature. Single Ag atoms, which were used to structure the surface electrode by tip manipulation, had been transferred from the tip by controlled tip-surface contacts [19].…”

Section: Atomic-scale Control Of Electron Transport Through Single Momentioning

confidence: 99%

Atomic-Scale Control of Electron Transport through Single Molecules

et al. 2010

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“…DOI The mechanical and electronic properties of materials at the atomic scale are important in various research areas ranging from adhesion and friction to photosynthesis and signal transduction in molecular structures. Electronic transport through nanostructures may find applications in devices and is being investigated for semiconducting [1] and metallic [2,3] constrictions, carbon nanotubes [4], DNA [5][6][7][8], and single metal atoms [9].…”

Section: Controlled Contact To Amentioning

confidence: 99%

Controlled Contact to aC60Molecule

et al. 2007

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“…For smaller electrode separations at contact, however, the spin polarization was predicted to drop sharply to zero over a range of ≈ 0.5Å. Relaxations of atomic positions owing to adhesive forces, which have been found for other single-atom [25] and single-molecule [26] contacts, were not included in these calculations. They may shift the range of distances where spin polarization is lost.…”

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Quantized Conductance of a Single Magnetic Atom

Néel

Berndt

2009

Phys. Rev. Lett.

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A single Co atom adsorbed on Cu(111) or on ferromagnetic Co islands is contacted with nonmagnetic W or ferromagnetic Ni tips in a scanning tunneling microscope. When the Co atom bridges two non-magnetic electrodes conductances of 2 e 2 /h are found. With two ferromagnetic electrodes a conductance of e 2 /h is observed which may indicate fully spin-polarized transport.PACS numbers: 68.37. Ef,72.25.Ba,73.23.Ad,73.63.Rt The conductance of nanometer-sized contacts may be decomposed into contributions of transport eigenchannels according to G = G 0 n i=1 τ i , where G 0 = 2e 2 /h is the quantum of conductance (-e: electron charge, h: Planck's constant), and τ i is the transmission probability of the ith channel [1,2]. The factor 2 in the quantum of conductance is due to spin degeneracy. In contacts involving magnetic electrodes the spin degeneracy of transport channels may be lifted. Each spin-polarized channel then may contribute up to G 0 /2 to the total conductance.A quantized conductance of G 0 /2 is expected when a fully spin-polarized current is transmitted with a probability of 1 through a spin-polarized transport channel. These conditions appear difficult to fulfill. Nevertheless, experimental observations of conductance quantization in units of G 0 /2 have repeatedly been reported [3,4,5,6,7,8]. These conductances were observed with [4,6] or without [3,5,7,8] external magnetic fields, for ferromagnetic [3,4,5,6,7] and non-magnetic electrodes [7,8]. On the other hand, the absence of noninteger conductance quantization has also been inferred from experimental results [9,10]. Untiedt et al. showed that contaminants like H 2 or CO modify the conductance and could, in the case of CO adsorption on Pt electrodes, give rise to a conductance of G 0 /2 [10]. A considerable variety of model calculations [11,12,13,14,15] have been performed and support the notion that conductance quantization in units of G 0 /2 is not expected from the investigated ferromagnetic contacts. It should be noted, however, that the modeling performed so far did not include geometrical relaxations of the contacts although the importance of the detailed atomic arrangement has been emphasized [11,15,16,17].The contradictory conclusions reached from the various experiments may be related to a lack of characterisation of the atomic details of the junction. This problem may be reduced by using a cryogenic scanning tunneling microscope to probe the conductance of clean singleatom contacts in ultra-high vacuum. Here we apply this approach to investigate prototypical junctions. A single magnetic atom on a spin-polarized island or a nonmagnetic substrate is contacted with non-magnetic and ferromagnetic tips. We find that the conductance of a single Co atom is G 0 when two non-magnetic electrodes are used. With ferromagnetic electrodes the conductance is G 0 /2. Conductances of ≈ 0.9 G 0 are observed for a combination of a non-magnetic and a ferromagnetic electrode. In contrast to previous experiments, the contact geometry and chemistry are character...

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Atom Transfer and Single-Adatom Contacts

Cited by 208 publications

References 19 publications

Atomic-Scale Control of Electron Transport through Single Molecules

Atomic-Scale Control of Electron Transport through Single Molecules

Controlled Contact to aC60Molecule

Quantized Conductance of a Single Magnetic Atom

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