Metal Nanowires: Quantum Transport, Cohesion, and Stability

Metal nanowires exhibit a number of interesting properties: their electrical conductance is quantized, their shot-noise is suppressed by the Pauli principle, and they are remarkably strong and stable. We show that many of these properties can be understood quantitatively using a nanoscale generalization of the free-electron model. Possible technological applications of nanowires are also discussed.