Fig. 1: Formation of Pt atomic wires in a break-junction setup.
From: Magnetic control over the fundamental structure of atomic wires
a Illustration of a break-junction setup and sketches of stretched Pt atomic wires. When an atomic contact between the junction’s electrodes is stretched, atoms are pulled from the electrode to form an atomic wire. The process can be repeated by remaking and stretching the contact. A magnetic field can be applied parallel or perpendicular to the junction axis (orange arrows) during the formation of atomic wires. b Examples of conductance traces as a function of inter electrode displacement measured in the absence of a magnetic field and with a bias voltage of 20 mV. Right before complete junction breaking, the conductance drops to ~1.6 G0, the typical conductance of a constriction with a cross-section of one Pt atom between the Pt electrodes (see Supplementary Section 1). Further stretching yields a conductance plateau that ends when the junction breaks. c Length histogram composed of 10,000 such conductance traces that presents the number of times that a plateau with a given length was observed in the conductance range of 1.0–2.5 G0. The set of peaks is a signature for the formation of atomic wires with different lengths, and the inter-peak distance is a good measure of the interatomic distance21,22,29,47,48.
