NanoWiki

Take a clean Si (SiO2) wafer. AFM it. Put 5 min Ag on it. AFM it. Put 2 (or 5, or 10) min Ag2S on it. AFM it.
This will give information on topography of the films we are making (most interesting is Ag2S roughness)
Take a clean piece of glass (or wafer). Put 2/5/10 min Ag2S in the middle. Next, put a Ag strip (5 min?) across the Ag2S. Check if silver strip is continuous.
This is preparation for multi-layered device.
Measure temperature dependence of the resistance of a device in ON state. Do the same in OFF state.
In the ON state contact should be metallic, so R should go down as T goes down. In the OFF state the contact should be an insulator/semiconductor, so R should go up as T goes down.
Our preliminary experiment shows that switching stops as we cool to LN2 temperature. BUT: ohashi_et_al._j.phys.soc.jap._54_752_1985_.pdf show switching even at 77K.
Try to get switching at 77K using higher voltage on the device. See how this voltage depends on temperature
We still need to quantify the switching as function of Ag2S layer thickness. We know it gets “better” as Ag2S gets thicker, bet we need some numbers.
This one is very labor-intensive, as a new sample has to be made and measured for each thickness. Volunteers?
Have we decided whether one of the electrodes really has to be Ag for the switching to happen? If you read japplphys_91_10110_terabe.pdf carefully you will see that they get switching even without silver.
How about us?

Micro-fabricate a device as shown here, consisting of a gold line (say 200 nm wide and 40 nm thick) and a silver line (same dimensions) which is perperndicular to the gold line. One of the ends of the silver line is ~300 nm from the middle of the gold line (so that they make an incomplete “T”). Cover the junction area with Ag2S. Wire both Au and Ag lines and stick the whole thing in SEM (we have a tool which allows us to do it). Apply a bias to switch the contact ON and observe the picture in the SEM. The intention is to see a dendritic “tree” of silver atoms growing from the silver electrode to the gold one. Also dissolving it at reverse bias would be kinda cool.
Conductive AFM experiment using the “public” AFM. Ruud Hendrix has experience with writing patterns on surfaces with conductive AFM tip. We can take a Ag/Ag2S sample into the AFM, and using Pt tip try to reproduce some of the experiments of Terabe japplphys_91_10110_terabe.pdf and terabe_et_al._apl_80_4009_2002_.pdf.
Use your imagination here - there's plenty of other cool experiments to do if this works!