Conductance of a tunnel point-contact of noble metals in the presence of a single defect

Abstract

In paper [1] (Avotina et al. Phys. Rev. B,74, 085411 (2006)) the effect of Fermi surface anisotropy to the conductance of a tunnel point contact, in the vicinity of which a single point-like defect is situated, has been investigated theoretically. The oscillatory dependence of the conductance on the distance between the contact and the defect has been found for a general Fermi surface geometry. In this paper we apply the method developed in [1] to the calculation of the conductance of noble metal contacts. An original algorithm, which enables the computation of the conductance for any parametrically given Fermi surface, is proposed. On this basis a pattern of the conductance oscillations, which can be observed by the method of scanning tunneling microscopy, is obtained for different orientations of the surface for the noble metals.