Evidence of shell structures in Au nanowires at room temperature

Statistical conductance properties of gold elongating nanowires at room temperature are studied experimentally. The measured conductance histogram, built with thousands of consecutive nanocontact breakage experiments, exhibits a rich structure of low-intensity peaks at high-conductance quanta values. Their position as a function of a peak index number suggests two markedly different regimes for electronic and atomic shell structures in these nanowires, as observed previously for alkali metal nanowires.