Reduced dimensionality leads to emergent phenomena in quantum materials and there is a need for accelerated materials discovery of nanoscale quantum materials in reduced dimensions. Thermomechanical nanomolding is a rapid synthesis method that produces high quality single-crystalline quantum nanowires with controlled dimensions over wafer-scale sizes. Herein, we apply nanomolding to fabricate nanowires from bulk feedstock of MoP, a triple-point topological metal with extremely high conductivity that is promising for low-resistance interconnects. Surprisingly, we obtained single-crystalline Mo4P3 nanowires, a metastable phase at room temperature in atmospheric pressure. We thus demonstrate nanomolding can create metastable phases inaccessible by other nanomaterial syntheses and can explore a previously inaccessible synthesis space at high temperatures and pressures. Furthermore, our results suggest that the current understanding of interfacial solid diffusion for nanomolding is incomplete, providing opportunities to explore solid-state diffusion at high-pressure and high-temperature regimes in confined dimensions.
@article{arxiv.2210.13392,
title = {Nanomolding of Metastable Mo$_{4}$P$_{3}$},
author = {Mehrdad T Kiani and Quynh P Sam and Gangtae Jin and Betül Pamuk and Hyeuk Jin Han and James L. Hart and J. R. Stauff and Judy J Cha},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.13392},
year = {2022}
}