Metal Nanowires: Quantum Transport, Cohesion, and Stability

Metal nanowires exhibit a number of interesting properties: their electrical conductance is quan-tized, their shot-noise is suppressed by the Pauli principle, and they are remarkably strong and stable. We show that many of these properties can be understood quantitatively using a nanoscale generalization of the free-electron model. Possible technological applications of nanowires are also discussed. Introduction Metal nanowires represent nature’s ultimate limit of conductors down to a single atom in thickness. In the past eight years, experimental research on metal nanowires has burgeoned [1–13]. The simplest model of a metal is the free-electron model [14], which already describes many bulk properties of simple monovalent metals semiquantitatively. In this article, we discuss our generalization of the free-electro