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

Abstract

In a previous paper [Ye. S. Avotina et al., Phys. Rev. B 74, 085411 (2006)], the effect of Fermi surface anisotropy on the conductance of a tunnel point contact with a single point-like defect situated in its vicinity was investigated theoretically. The oscillatory dependence of the conductance on the distance between the contact and the defect was found for a general Fermi surface geometry. In the present paper the method developed in the cited work is applied to the calculation of the conductance of noble metal contacts. An original algorithm, which enables the computation of the conductance for any parametrically specified 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.