Dislocation-driven growth of single-crystal metal foils with high-index facets

Single-crystal metal foil with high-index facets is an emerging metastable platform for 2D epitaxy, catalysis and electronics. However, its controlled growth has been plagued by the lack of a selective mechanism for driving diverse high-index facets. Here, we report a versatile strategy for the deterministic growth of single-crystal metal foils with diverse high-index facets. By incorporating dislocation energy differences to lift the free energy of strong (100) texture, we selectively activated the abnormal growth of high-index facets with an enhanced driving force, thus enabling the deterministic growth of single-crystal Cu, Ni and Au foils with dozens of high-index facets. Such energized growth leads to a counterintuitive discovery that increasing the driving force reduces the retarding force of ubiquitous thermal groove, which allows one order of magnitude improvement in the growth rate by greatly improving the net driving force. This work provides both thermodynamic and kinetic insights into precise metastability engineering strategies and points to a pathway to expand the library of high-quality single-crystal metal foils with high-index facets for various applications.