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Interfacial Plating Driving Convection‐Like Motion of a Sandwiched Nanocrystal

Researchers demonstrated that nanoscale copper, silver and aluminum crystals confined between two plates move in a closed‑loop fashion when exposed to extreme axial temperature gradients of about 108 K m⁻¹. Atoms migrate along the surface from the hot side to the cold side, creating a compressive back‑stress up to roughly 102 MPa that pushes the crystal core in the opposite direction. This convection‑like mass transport couples directional surface diffusion with rigid‑body translation, a regime previously unseen in solid‑state physics. Molecular dynamics simulations and theoretical analysis corroborate the experimental observations.