Watching it all fall apart The control of the shape and size of metal nanoparticles can be very sensitive to the growth conditions of the particles. Ye et al. studied the reverse process: They tracked the dissolution of gold nanoparticles in a redox environment inside a liquid cell within an electron microscope, controlling the particle dissolution with the electron beam. Tracking short-lived particle shapes revealed structures of greater or lesser stability. The findings suggest kinetic routes to particle sizes and shapes that would otherwise be difficult to generate. Science , this issue p. 874

We demonstrate the fabrication of individual nanopores in hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) with atomically precise control of the pore shape and size. Previous methods of pore production in other 2D materials typically create pores with irregular geometry and imprecise diameters. In contrast, other studies have shown that with careful control of electron irradiation, defects in h-BN grow with pristine zig-zag edges at quantized triangular sizes, but they have failed to demonstrate production and control of isolated defects. In this work, we combine these techniques to yield a method in which we can create individual size-quantized triangular nanopores through an h-BN sheet. The pores are created using the electron beam of a conventional transmission electron microscope; which can strip away multiple layers of h-BN exposing single-layer regions, introduce single vacancies, and preferentially grow vacancies only in the single-layer region. We further demonstrate how the geometry of these pores can be altered beyond triangular by changing beam conditions. Precisely size- and geometry-tuned nanopores could find application in molecular sensing, DNA sequencing, water desalination, and molecular separation.