Nano Lett. doi:10.1021/nl902186v (2009)

To increase conductance in miniaturized circuits, just add gold.

Paul Alivisatos at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues were looking to see how the interface between a semiconductor nanorod and a metal would affect conductance. So they immersed the 40-nanometre-long cadmium selenide rods in a solution containing gold. This capped the rod tips with gold directly, and avoided the formation of a gold–semiconductor alloy, or a surfactant layer on the nanorod tip — both consequences of other rod-making procedures.

The procedure placed gold atoms on the tips of the rods and decreased the barrier to conductance — known as a Schottky barrier — giving them 100,000 times improved behaviour.