Atomic layer removal in silver via heating

Artificial intelligence triggered device miniaturization and it requires materials to be processed easily and the associate fabrication techniques of much high precision, approaching atomic scale precision. However, thermal performances of materials at small scale are essential to the fabrication process. Although researchers have tried to apply sublimation of materials as potential atomic scale fabrication technique for device miniaturization, there exists limited controllability for possible applications. In this work, we studied the thermal performances of silver nanowires (Ag NWs) under in situ transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and found two distinctive but inherently related phenomena. The Ag NWs evaporated discontinuously at nano scale and left with sharp edges of Ag (111) plane. With high resolution TEM imaging, the atomic Ag (111) planes sublimate layer by layer. Furthermore, the sublimation rate of atomic Ag (111) plane is analyzed for faithful controllability. Thus so, such atomic layer removal (ALR) process in silver achieved simply by heating has great potential to be used as efficient atomic manufacturing technique to promote device miniaturization to facilitate the blooming artificial intelligence. © 2025 Chongqing University. Publishing services by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co. Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).