Correlation between 1/fnoise and grain boundaries in thin gold films

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Abstract
We have measured the 1/f noise of simultaneously and identically prepared submicron-scale gold samples with none or only a few grain boundaries. We consistently observed that the samples with the lowest number of grain boundaries produced the lowest noise. In addition, micron-scale single-crystalline gold samples when measured displayed about (1/3) of the noise of similar polycrystalline samples. This is strong evidence that a significant part of the 1/f noise of a gold sample is related to atomic motion near or along a grain boundary.