Regensburg 2016 – scientific programme

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O: Fachverband Oberflächenphysik

O 87: Metal Substrates: Structure, Epitaxy and Growth

O 87.6: Talk

Thursday, March 10, 2016, 16:30–16:45, S053

Mapping the contact formation of a gold tip approaching the Au(111) surface — •Lukas Gerhard¹ and Wulf Wulfhekel^1,2 — ¹Institut für Nanotechnologie (INT), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), 76344 Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen — ²Physikalisches Institut (PI), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), 76049 Karlsruhe

The understanding of the interplay between forces, relaxations, and electron transport during formation and breaking of a contact between two metallic electrodes is of fundamental interest for nano-scale electronics. Here we use the gold tip of a low-temperature scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to reproducibly form and break a contact with a reconstructed Au(111) surface without degradation of the electrodes. From a set of about 20.000 individual measurements we mapped the work function, the tip-sample separation at jump into contact, the jump in conductance, and the hysteresis in the approach-retract curve with atomic resolution on an area of 1 x 9 nm ² spanning the 22 x √3 unit cell of the reconstruction. The variation of these parameters due to the difference in the local coordination environment is discussed.