Mechanical, electrical, and magnetic properties of Ni nanocontacts

The dynamic deformation upon stretching of Ni nanowires as those formed with mechanically controllable break junctions or with a scanning tunneling microscope is studied both experimentally and theoretically. Molecular dynamics simulations of the breaking process are performed. In addition, and in order to compare with experiments, we also compute the transport properties in the last stages before failure using the first-principles implementation of Landauer's formalism included in our transport package ALACANT.

This work was supported in part by the Ministry of Education and Science (MEC) of Spain under Grant MAT2007-65487, Grant FIS2004-02356, and Grant CONSOLIDER CSD2007-00010 and in part by the Generalitat Valenciana under Grant ACOMP06/138. The works of M. J. Caturla and C. Untiedt were supported by the Spanish McyT. F. under a “Ramón y Cajal” grant.