Open Access

Tomoya Asaba, Lang Peng, Takahiro Ono, Satoru Akutagawa, Ibuki Tanaka, Hinako Murayama, Shota Suetsugu, Aleksandar Razpopov, Yuichi Kasahara, Takahito Terashima, Yuhki Kohsaka, Takasada Shibauchi, Masatoshi Ichikawa, Roser Valentí, Shin-ichi Sasa, Yuji Matsuda

• 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.