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

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-determine the location of the electrical failure before it occurs. (C) 2014 AIP Publishing LLC.