1997/11/24 by S. Blom, Håkan Olin, H. Olin +7 · 1 citation
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Mechanical and Optical Resonators #Molecular Junctions and Nanostructures #Quantum and electron transport phenomena #cond-mat.mes-hall
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevb.57.8830
4 pages, 3 figures, reference corrected
arxiv created 1997/11/24 · openalex publication_date 1998/04/15 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
When two metal electrodes are separated, a nanometer-sized wire (nanowire) is formed just before the contact breaks. The electrical conduction measured during this retraction process shows signs of quantized conductance in units of G0=2e2/h. Recent experiments show that the force acting on the wire during separation fluctuates, which has been interpreted as being due to atomic rearrangements. In this paper we use a simple free-electron model, for two simple geometries, and show that the electronic contribution to the force fluctuations is comparable to the experimentally found values, about 2 nN.