Electron irradiation and high temperature

Irradiating the specimen with the electron beam creates defects such as vacancies and interstitals. The system is driven away from equilibrium. Heating causes annealing and reconstructing of defects and so a relaxation towards equilibrium. Combining both irradiation and heating allows us to modify the object with extremely high lateral precision. “Nanoengineering” of object such as graphene or carbon nanotubes has been undertaken.