# REFERENCES

Comment on “Quantum Suppression of Shot Noise in Atom-Size Metallic Contacts”

In a recent letter , van den Brom and van Ruitenbeek found a pronounced suppression of the shot noise in atom-size gold contacts with conductances near integer multiples of $`G_0=2e^2/h`$, revealing unambiguously the quantized nature of the electronic transport. However, the ad hoc model they introduced to describe the contribution of partially-open conductance channels to the shot noise is unable to fit either the maxima or minima of their shot noise data. Here we point out that a model of quantum-confined electrons with disorder  quantitatively reproduces the measurements of Ref. .

We model a nanocontact in a monovalent metal as a deformable constriction in an electron gas, with disorder included via randomly distributed delta-function potentials . For convenience, the system is taken to be two-dimensional. The transmission probabilities $`T_n`$ of the conducting channels are obtained via a modified recursive Green’s function algorithm . The dimensionless shot noise $`s_I`$ at zero temperature is 

$$s_I\frac{P_I}{2eI}=\frac{_nT_n(1T_n)}{_nT_n},$$
(1)   
where $`P_I`$ is the shot noise spectral density and $`I`$ is the time-average current. Plotting $`s_I`$ versus the conductance $`G=G_0_nT_n`$ eliminates the dependence on dimensionality for an ideal contact, provided no special symmetries are present.

Starting from the numerical data that were used to generate the conductance histogram in Ref. , we compute the mean and standard deviation of $`s_I`$ and $`T_n`$ as functions of $`G`$. The averages are taken over an ensemble of impurity configurations and contact shapes. The agreement of the experimental results for particular contacts and the calculated distribution of $`s_I`$ shown in Fig. 1(b) is extremely good: 67% of the experimental points lie within one standard deviation of $`s_I`$ and 89% lie within two standard deviations . It should be emphasized that no attempt has been made to fit the shot-noise data; the numerical data of Ref. , where the length of the contact and the strength of the disorder (mean-free path $`k_F\mathrm{}=70`$) were chosen to give qualitative agreement with experimental conductance histograms for gold , have simply been re-analyzed to calculate $`s_I`$.

Contrary to the model of Ref. , the minima of $`s_I`$ do not occur at integer multiples of $`G_0`$, but are shifted to lower values, which correspond not to maxima of the conductance histogram, but rather to maxima of $`T_n`$.

Fig. 1(c) shows that the number of partially-open channels increases in proportion to $`G`$. For comparison, the shot noise for a contact with only one partially-open channel, which sets a lower bound, is shown as a dashed curve in Fig. 1(b). The presence of several partially open channels for $`G>G_0`$ increases $`s_I`$ above this lower bound, leading to an apparent saturation at $`s_I0.18`$ for larger contacts. Neither the maxima nor the minima of the experimental data can be fit by the model of Ref. , which includes only two partially-open conductance channels.

The excellent agreement between the shot-noise data of Ref.  and our model calculation suggests that quantum transport in gold nanocontacts can be well described by a model which includes only two essential features, quantum confinement and coherent backscattering from imperfections in the contact.

J. B. acknowledges support from Swiss National Foundation PNR 36 “Nanosciences” grant # 4036-044033. 

J. Bürki<sup>1,2,3</sup> and C. A. Stafford<sup>1</sup>

<sup>1</sup>University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721

<sup>2</sup>Université de Fribourg, 1700 Fribourg, Switzerland

<sup>3</sup>IRRMA, EPFL, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland

Submitted to Phys. Rev. Lett. on 3 June 1999

PACS numbers: 72.70.+m, 72.15.Eb, 73.23.Ad, 73.40.Jn