Targeted electron beam creates thousands of atomic crystal defects

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13 May 2026 Targeted electron beam creates thousands of atomic crystal defects An electron-beam technique that can precisely create thousands of atomic defects in a crystal could be used to build quantum devices. By Toma Susi ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2513-573X 0 Toma Susi Toma Susi is in the Faculty of Physics, University of Vienna, Vienna 1090, Austria. View author publications PubMed Google Scholar

In 1959, the physicist Richard Feynman posed the question: “What would happen if we could arrange the atoms one by one the way we want them?”1 This vision represents the ultimate limit of both materials science and nanotechnology — the study and control of matter down to the atomic scale. Highly focused electron beams can be used to manipulate single atoms in a crystal, but so far it has only been possible to make a handful of rearrangements at a time. Now, writing in Nature, Klein et al.2 report a method for manipulating thousands of lattice sites in a crystal in minutes using an electron beam, creating controllable patterns of defects that promise to have intriguing quantum properties.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-01328-8

References Feynman, R. P. Engineering and Science 23 (5), 22–36 (1960). Klein, J. et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10431-9 (2026). Eigler, D. M. & Schweizer, E. K. Nature 344, 524–526 (1990). Susi, T. et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 115501 (2014). Susi, T., Meyer, J. C. & Kotakoski, J. Ultramicroscopy 180, 163–172 (2017). Dyck, O., Kim, S., Kalinin, S. V. & Jesse, S. Appl. Phys. Lett. 111, 113104 (2017). Hudak, B. M. et al. ACS Nano 12, 5873–5879 (2018). Susi, T. Chem. Commun. 58, 12274–12285 (2022). Drost, R., Ojanen, T., Harju, A. & Liljeroth, P. Nature Phys. 13, 668–671 (2017). Dong, Z. et al. Nature Commun. 16, 1219 (2025). Download references

Competing Interests The author declares no competing interests.

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