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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.

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