Published in

National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 9(112), p. 2658-2663, 2015

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1418632112

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Conductance enlargement in picoscale electroburnt graphene nanojunctions

Journal article published in 2015 by Hatef Sadeghi ORCID, Jan A. Mol, Chit Siong Lau, G. Andrew D. Briggs, Jamie Warner, Colin J. Lambert
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Abstract

Provided the electrical properties of electroburnt graphene junctions can be understood and controlled, they have the potential to underpin the development of a wide range of future sub-10-nm electrical devices. We examine both theoretically and experimentally the electrical conductance of electroburnt graphene junctions at the last stages of nanogap formation. We account for the appearance of a counterintuitive increase in electrical conductance just before the gap forms. This is a manifestation of room-temperature quantum interference and arises from a combination of the semimetallic band structure of graphene and a cross-over from electrodes with multiple-path connectivity to single-path connectivity just before breaking. Therefore, our results suggest that conductance enlargement before junction rupture is a signal of the formation of electroburnt junctions, with a picoscale current path formed from a single sp2 bond.