• Tanaka, Ibuki
• Kohsaka, Yuhki
• Valenti, Roser
• Kasahara, Yuichi
• Terashima, Takahito
• Sasa, Shin-Ichi
• Shibauchi, Takasada
• Ono, Takahiro
• Ichikawa, Masatoshi
• Murayama, Hinako
• Akutagawa, Satoru
• Matsuda, Yuji
• Peng, Lang
• Razpopov, Aleksandar

Abstract

<jats:p>Continued advances in quantum technologies rely on producing nanometer-scale wires. Although several state-of-the-art nanolithographic technologies and bottom-up synthesis processes have been used to engineer these wires, critical challenges remain in growing uniform atomic-scale crystalline wires and constructing their network structures. Here, we discover a simple method to fabricate atomic-scale wires with various arrangements, including stripes, X-junctions, Y-junctions, and nanorings. Single-crystalline atomic-scale wires of a Mott insulator, whose bandgap is comparable to those of wide-gap semiconductors, are spontaneously grown on graphite substrates by pulsed-laser deposition. These wires are one unit cell thick and have an exact width of two and four unit cells (1.4 and 2.8 nm) and lengths up to a few micrometers. We show that the nonequilibrium reaction-diffusion processes may play an essential role in atomic pattern formation. Our findings offer a previously unknown perspective on the nonequilibrium self-organization phenomena on an atomic scale, paving a unique way for the quantum architecture of nano-network.</jats:p>

Topics

• Deposition
• impedance spectroscopy
• semiconductor
• wire
• quantum wire