Sadeghi, Hatef and Mol, Jan A. and Lau, Chit Siong and Briggs, G. Andrew D. and Warner, Jamie and Lambert, Colin J. (2015) Conductance enlargement in picoscale electroburnt graphene nanojunctions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 112 (9): 201418632. pp. 2658-2663. ISSN 0027-8424
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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.