Abstract
Mechanical instabilities produce periodic out-of-plane deformations, but applications remain limited by the need for elastic substrates and weak controllability. Here, we induce coherent, instability-driven buckling in both van der Waals (vdW) layers and underlying amorphous silica at room temperature, achieving precise spatial control and deterministic orientation. Electron-beam builds crystal-axis-dependent stress in α-MoO3, while simultaneously facilitating viscous flow in silica, producing sinusoidal wrinkles at subwavelength whose dimension are tunable by α-MoO3 thickness and electron dose. These wrinkles diffract light as on-chip optical gratings. We show coherent buckling across vdW heterostructures and peel off α-MoO3 post-buckling, leaving imprinted silica. Similar crystal-aligned wrinkles appear on amorphous Al2O3 and SiNx. By removing reliance on elastic substrates, this work extends the scope of instability-driven, lithography-free subwavelength patterning to CMOS-relevant dielectrics.
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Acknowledgements
Part of the characterization was conducted using resources of the Shared Equipment Authority, including the clean room at Rice University. Y.L, A.C., and H.Y.L. disclose that the research was sponsored by the Army Research Office and was accomplished under Grant Number W911NF-25-1-0265. Z.H. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation under the award no. DMR-2421596. X.M. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation under the award no. EECS-2427198. X.L. acknowledges support from the Rice Advanced Materials Institute (RAMI) at Rice University as a RAMI Postdoctoral Fellow. X.L. and Y.H. acknowledge the support from NSF (FUSE-2329111 and CMMI-2239545) and the Welch Foundation (C-2065). C.L. and J.L. acknowledge the support from NSF IUCRC Center for Atomically Thin Multifunctional Coatings (ATOMIC) under award #EEC-2113882 and the Welch Foundation (C-2248). K.W. and T.T. acknowledge the support from the JSPS KAKENHI (Grant Numbers 21H05233 and 23H02052), the CREST (JPMJCR24A5), JST and World Premier International Research Center Initiative (WPI), MEXT, Japan. T.L. acknowledges support from no relevant funding.
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Liu, Y., Huang, Z., Li, X. et al. Room temperature molding of amorphous dielectrics via van der Waals anisotropy at the nanoscale. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-73078-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-73078-0
