Atomic-scale nanowire arrays grown by Turing instability

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 such wires, critical challenges remain in growing uniform atomic-scale crystalline wires and constructing their network structures. We discover a novel crystal growth mechanism that is based on a self-organization phenomenon. This mechanism enables fabricating atomic-scale wires with various arrangements, including X-, Y-junctions, and nanorings. Single-crystalline atomic-scale wires of semiconducting β-RuCl₃ are grown on graphite substrate 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 $mu$m. Furthermore, we find typical hallmarks of the non-equilibrium reaction-diffusion processes in the wire patterns, implying that the uniformly aligned wires are possibly formed by Turing instability, a concept that describes how patterns in nature can arise autonomously. Our findings offer a new perspective on the non-equilibrium self-organization phenomena on an atomic scale, which paves a unique way for the quantum architecture of nano-network.