Meet graphene’s latest metal cousin, goldene. For the primary time, researchers have created a free-standing sheet of gold that’s only one atom thick.
The advance, reported within the April 16 Nature Synthesis, may just at some point permit scientists to make use of much less gold in electronics and chemical reactions, says fabrics physicist Lars Hultman of Linköping College in Sweden. The gold sheet may additionally showcase unique homes like the ones present in different two-dimensional fabrics (SN: 10/2/19).
Goldene holds promise as “a super catalyst as it’s a lot more economically viable” than thicker, 3-dimensional gold, Hultman says. “You don’t want as many gold atoms to get the similar serve as.”
Gold joins a rarefied team consisting of a number of components, together with carbon and phosphorus, which were formulated into 2-D sheets (SN: 3/10/14). Whilst two-dimensional sheets of nonmetal components — equivalent to carbon-based graphene — can also be ready with relative ease, making 2-D sheets with metals equivalent to iron and gold is tougher, Hultman says (SN: 1/17/18). In gold’s case, atoms have a tendency to type clumps moderately than flat sheets.
Hultman and co-workers first made a 3-dimensional subject matter known as titanium gold carbide, whose construction comprises two-dimensional sheets of gold. Then they etched off the encompassing subject matter with a potassium-based resolution, leaving goldene in the back of.
“The excellent news used to be that we had been releasing goldene,” Hultman says. “The unhealthy information used to be that because the goldene used to be freed, it began to twist up on itself like a scroll.” Preserving the goldene sheets flat required the group so as to add a surfactant to the etching resolution during which the sheets floated.
The group hopes to use a equivalent etching way to make 2-D sheets of different metals like iridium and platinum, says coauthor Shun Kashiwaya, a fabrics scientist at Linköping College.