A pair of specialized scanning tunneling microscope probes measures
the conductance and force as a chain of gold atoms is stretched between
two gold electrodes. The arrows in the bottom graph indicate jumps in
the force measurement which correspond to atoms popping out of the electrodes
and adding to the chain, until the chain finally breaks under the strain
Reported by: G. Rubio-Bollinger et al, Physical Review Letters,
9 July 2001.
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