Abstract
The tip of a low-temperature scanning tunneling microscope is approached towards a molecule adsorbed at a pentagon-hexagon bond on Cu(100) to form a tip-molecule contact. The conductance rapidly increases to conductance quanta in the transition region from tunneling to contact. Ab-initio calculations within density functional theory and nonequilibrium Green’s function techniques explain the experimental data in terms of the conductance of an essentially undeformed . The conductance in the transition region is affected by structural fluctuations which modulate the tip-molecule distance.
- Received 22 August 2006
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.98.065502
©2007 American Physical Society