Orientation-Dependent Transparency of Metallic Interfaces

TL;DR

This paper predicts how the transparency of metallic interfaces varies with crystal orientation, revealing significant anisotropy especially between silver and aluminum, which impacts electron transport in miniaturized devices.

Contribution

It provides first-principles calculations of orientation-dependent interface transparency, highlighting large anisotropy in nearly lattice-matched metals.

Findings

Silver-aluminum interfaces show up to twofold difference in transparency between orientations.

Orientation significantly affects electron transmission at metallic interfaces.

Results aid in designing nanoscale electronic devices with optimized interface properties.

Abstract

As devices are reduced in size, interfaces start to dominate electrical transport making it essential to be able to describe reliably how they transmit and reflect electrons. For a number of nearly perfectly lattice-matched materials, we calculate from first-principles the dependence of the interface transparency on the crystal orientation. Quite remarkably, the largest anisotropy is predicted for interfaces between the prototype free-electron materials silver and aluminium for which a massive factor of two difference between (111) and (001) interfaces is found.