Despite the great promise of low-dimensional materials due to their exciting properties, they are not always directly suitable for applications. One way to tune the material properties is to manipulate the atomic structure using particle irradiation. However, as one might expect, this is challenging to do in the case of extremely thin materials, where careful control over the irradiation energy and solid understanding of the underlying atomic-scale phenomena are required. Despite the challenges, electron and ion irradiation have recently evolved into powerful techniques to manipulation the atomic structure of two-dimensional materials. At the same time, the recent advancements in aberration-corrected transmission electron microscopy both provide means to directly image the manipulated structures but also to fine tune them by inducing local structural changes and even to move defects and impurity atoms.
In this presentation, I will show that low-dimensional materials change shape due to van der Waals interaction within heterostructures, describe the advances in manipulating low-dimensional materials with electron irradiation, including nanometer-range chemical etching and directed diffusion of impurity atoms, and provide an overview of our latest results in using ion irradiation at a large energy scale to modify 2D materials via introduction of foreign atoms and nanopores. Finally, I will also demonstrate that transmission electron microscopy can be incorporated as an integral part of a ultra-high vacuum setup with different possibilities for experimentation before, during and after atomic-resolution microscopy.