JELLIUM MODEL OF METALLIC NANOCOHESION

A unified treatment of the cohesive and conducting properties of metal lic nanostructures in terms of the electronic scattering matrix is dev eloped. A simple picture of metallic nanocohesion in which conductance channels act as delocalized chemical bonds is derived in the jellium approximation. Universal force oscillations of order epsilon(F)/lambda (F) are predicted when a metallic quantum wire is stretched to the bre aking point, which are synchronized with quantized jumps in the conduc tance.