Nanomolding of metastable Mo4P3

Reduced dimensionality leads to emergent phenomena in quantum materials, and there is a need for accelerated materials discovery of nanoscale quantum materials in reduced dimensions. Thermo mechanical nanomolding is a rapid synthesis method that produces high-quality single-crystalline nanowires with controlled dimensions over wafer-scale sizes. Herein, we apply nanomolding to fabricate nanowires from bulk feedstock of MoP, a triple-point topological metal with extremely high conductivity that is promising for low-resistance interconnects. Surprisingly, we obtained single crystalline Mo4P3 nanowires, which is a metastable phase at room temperature and atmospheric pressure. We thus demonstrate that nanomolding can create metastable phases inaccessible by other nanomaterial syntheses and can explore a previously inaccessible synthesis space at high temperatures and pressures. Furthermore, our results suggest that the current understanding of interfacial solid diffusion for nanomolding is incomplete, providing opportunities to explore solid-state diffusion at highpressure and high-temperature regimes in confined dimensions.