Single-atom conductance of Y

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• 作者：Nadia Parveen ; Yuji Ishino ; Shu Kurokawa ; Akira Sakai ; ^{sakai.akira.4z@kyoto-u.ac.jp" class="auth_mail" title="E-mail the corresponding author}
• 关键词：Single-atom contact ; Yttrium ; Conductance ; Electron transmission
• 刊名：Physica B: Physics of Condensed Matter
• 出版年：2016
• 出版时间：1 May 2016
• 年：2016
• 卷：488
• 期：Complete
• 页码：57-61
• 全文大小：1354 K

文摘

Y is a trivalent metal like Al but has one d valence electron instead of one p valence electron in Al. This makes a single-atom contact of Y a suitable playground for investigating how d valence electrons contribute to the single-atom conductance. In this paper, we present the results of our theoretical and experimental studies of the single-atom conductance of Y. We carried out conductance measurements on Y contacts and found that the conductance histogram observed at 4 K exhibits a single broad peak at 1.9G₀$1.9G_0$. We also calculated the electron transmission through a Y single-atom contact and obtained the total transmission 1.75 at the Fermi level. Both our theoretical and experimental findings consistently indicate that the single-atom conductance of Y lies at (1.8–1.9)G₀$(1.8–1.9)G_0$, which is nearly twice as high as that of Al. This increase in the single-atom conductance is due to the second and the third eigenchannels of Y which accomplish higher transmission compared to those of Al. We found that the difference in the contours of sd- and sp-eigenchannels can account for the higher transmission of the sd-eigenchannels.