Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory have developed a new molecular layer etching technique that could potentially enable the manufacture of increasingly small microelectronics. “Our ability to control matter at the nanoscale is limited by the kinds of tools we have to add or remove thin layers of material. Molecular layer etching (MLE) is a tool to allow manufacturers and researchers to precisely control the way thin materials, at microscopic and nanoscales, are removed,” said lead author Matthias Young, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri and former postdoctoral researcher at Argonne.