2004/09/30 by Z. Yang, Zhongqin Yang, Mairbek Chshiev +7 · 71 citations
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Aluminium #Breakup #Composite material #Condensed matter physics #Current (fluid) #Dissipation #Electrode #Force Microscopy Techniques and Applications #Materials science #Mechanics #Molecular Junctions and Nanostructures #Physics #Range (aeronautics) #Semiconductor materials and devices #Thermal #Thermal fluctuations #Thermodynamics #cond-mat.mes-hall
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevb.71.041402
published in Physical Review B 71(4) (American Physical Society) · 4 pages, 4 figures
arxiv created 2004/09/30 · openalex publication_date 2005/01/13 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We investigate the role of local heating and forces on ions in the stability of current-carrying aluminum wires. For a given bias, we find that heating increases with wire length due to a redshift of the frequency spectrum. Nevertheless, the local temperature of the wire is relatively low for a wide range of biases provided good thermal contact exists between the wire and the bulk electrodes. On the contrary, current-induced forces increase substantially as a function of bias and reach bond-breaking values at about 1 V. These results suggest that local heating promotes low-bias instabilities if dissipation into the bulk electrodes is not efficient, while current-induced forces are mainly responsible for the wire breakup at large biases. We compare these results to experimental observations.