Polyelemental Nanoparticle Synthesis Enabled by Noncontact Metallothermic Reactions

Abstract

Combinatorial synthesis, when coupled with high-throughput screening, accelerates materials discovery. However, the vast design space and synthetic challenges of nanomaterials present considerable barriers, and their structure–function relationships often differ from those of bulk materials. Here, we introduce an approach that combines “noncontact metallothermic reactions” with polymer pen lithography (PPL) and scanning probe block copolymer lithography (SPBCL) to enable the creation of libraries containing millions of nanoscale features. We successfully demonstrated the synthesis of diverse metal combinations spanning p-, d-, and f-block elements using nine representative ones (i.e., Al, Sc, Ti, V, Cr, Mn, Fe, Ga, La). We study the reaction pathway using Al_0.95Sc_0.05 as a model system and validate the method’s scalability by preparing a 2 × 2 cm² chip made of glassy carbon, a common electrode material used for electrocatalysis, and characterizing representative compositions. This approach enables the efficient synthesis and exploration of complex material compositions, not attainable by existing methods, in a substrate general manner (SiN_x, glassy carbon, and amorphous SiO₂) that will advance the systematic discovery of novel nanomaterials.