Erratum: High-bias conductance of atom-sized Al contacts [Phys. Rev. B68, 155428 (2003)]

Abstract

The breaking speed of the contact was incorrectly stated as 42 nm/s instead of 420 nm/s. This speed was used in Sec. IV B to estimate the displacement of the Al wire during ͗ Al ͘ and the tensile force accumulated within the contact. Their correct values are ϳ1 pm and ϳ10 pN, respectively. The corrected force is, however, still two orders of magnitudes smaller than a typical break force of metal single-atom contacts. Therefore, the error does not affect our argument that the stress accumulation is not the dominant breaking mechanism of Al and Au single-atom contacts under high biases.

Stability of Atom-sized Metal Contacts under High Biases

“…First, the marked difference between p Au and p Ag tells us that the bias dependence of p of an SAC is not closely related to its electronic structure since Au and Ag SACs show similar electronic structures but have different ps. Second, the critical bias (0.6 V), at which p Ag vanishes, roughly agrees with those of p Al and p Cu (0.8 V and 0.6 V, respectively) [4,7]. This comparison implies that the bias dependence of p Ag is a 'normal' behavior of p, and the wide bias range of p Au over 2 V is rather exceptional.…”

“…Compared to Au SACs, Al SACs are found to be less stable. Our conductance measurements on Al SACs [4] showed that p Al vanishes at 0.8 V, well below the critical bias of p Au . It, however, remains unclear why Au SACs survive up to high biases while Al SACs do not.…”

“…Figure 1 shows a schematic of our conductance measuring system used in this experiment. Since details of this system can be found elsewhere [4], we here briefly mention about some important points in our experimental procedures. Au and Ag nanocontacts were formed between a 0.5 mm metal tip and a metals disk, both of which are of 99.999% purity.…”

“…In our previous experiments, we measured the high-bias conductance of Au [2,3,4] and Au alloys [5], and studied how p Au changes with the bias voltage. Our experimental results showed that p Au decreases with increasing the bias and vanishes around 2 V. This critical bias nicely corresponds to 2.3 V at which almost all 1G 0 contacts of Au become disrupted [6].…”

Current-induced energy barrier suppression for electromigration from first principles

“…7 of Ref. [56], one might estimate the experimental lifetime to vanish at around 1.6 V. A further detailed study of the breaking and of the electromigration phenomenon in Al nanowires with more realistic junction geometries, such as those discussed in Refs. [57,58,59], will be presented elsewhere.…”