Conductance of Pd single-atom contacts

Abstract We have measured the conductance of Pd single-atom contacts (SACs) at room temperature in UHV using a contact-breaking method. Transient conductance traces displayed some marginal plateaus at unspecified positions, resulting featureless conductance histograms for applied biases 0.2–0.6 V. Our experimental results are consistent with our previous experiments on Pd contact relays but apparently not with the previous observations of 1G0 and 0.5G0 peaks in the conductance histogram of Pd. We consider that the structure sensitivity of the conductance of Pd SACs partly dissolves this discrepancy.