Pre-determining the location of electromigrated gaps by nonlinear optical imaging

TL;DR

This paper introduces a nonlinear optical imaging technique to predict the location of electromigration-induced gaps in gold nanowires by detecting defect-related nonlinear signals before failure occurs.

Contribution

The study presents a novel nonlinear imaging method that maps electrical constrictions in nanowires, enabling pre-determination of failure sites prior to electromigration.

Findings

Defects act as nonlinear optical sources in nanowires.

Differential conductance decreases at defect sites under laser illumination.

The method predicts failure locations before electromigration occurs.

Abstract

In this paper we describe a nonlinear imaging method employed to spatially map the occurrence of constrictions occurring on an electrically-stressed gold nanowire. The approach consists at measuring the influence of a tightly focused ultrafast pulsed laser on the electronic transport in the nanowire. We found that structural defects distributed along the nanowire are efficient nonlinear optical sources of radiation and that the differential conductance is significantly decreased when the laser is incident on such electrically-induced morphological changes. This imaging technique is applied to pre-determined the location of the electrical failure before it occurs.