Meet graphene’s latest metallic cousin, goldene. For the primary time, researchers have created a free-standing sheet of gold that’s only one atom thick.
The event, reported within the April 16 Nature Synthesis, may sometime enable scientists to make use of much less gold in electronics and chemical reactions, says supplies physicist Lars Hultman of Linköping College in Sweden. The gold sheet might also exhibit unique properties like these present in different two-dimensional supplies (SN: 10/2/19).
Goldene holds promise as “an ideal catalyst as a result of it’s way more economically viable” than thicker, three-dimensional gold, Hultman says. “You don’t want as many gold atoms to get the identical perform.”
Gold joins a rarefied group consisting of a number of parts, together with carbon and phosphorus, which have been formulated into 2-D sheets (SN: 3/10/14). Whereas two-dimensional sheets of nonmetal parts — reminiscent of carbon-based graphene — may be ready with relative ease, making 2-D sheets with metals reminiscent of iron and gold is tougher, Hultman says (SN: 1/17/18). In gold’s case, atoms are inclined to type clumps moderately than flat sheets.
Hultman and colleagues first made a three-dimensional materials known as titanium gold carbide, whose construction incorporates two-dimensional sheets of gold. Then they etched off the encompassing materials with a potassium-based resolution, leaving goldene behind.
“The excellent news was that we had been liberating goldene,” Hultman says. “The dangerous information was that because the goldene was freed, it began to twist up on itself like a scroll.” Protecting the goldene sheets flat required the group so as to add a surfactant to the etching resolution wherein the sheets floated.
The group hopes to use the same etching technique to make 2-D sheets of different metals like iridium and platinum, says coauthor Shun Kashiwaya, a supplies scientist at Linköping College.
