Critical stability of gold nanofingers on a zero-gradient stepped surface

Numerous methods and techniques have been developed in recent years for the fabrication of two-dimensional and one-dimensional nanostructures that exhibit quantum effects. In order to understand the size-dependent stability of such structures, we have developed a method where the tip of the scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) is used to extract atoms from pre-fabricated gold nanofingers. The rate of atom removal as a function of the finger width at a constant temperature provides a direct evaluation of the size-dependent stability of the fingers. Our study reveals that the stability of the nanofinger has a strong dependence on the width of the finger.