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Goldene is a film of gold one atom thick [1]
['Rob Beschizza']
Date: 2024-04-18
Goldene is a layer of gold a single atom thick. It doesn't look very … goldy?… but it's a major achievement of materials science. Shun Kashiwaya and others:
The synthesis of monolayer gold has so far been limited to free-standing several-atoms-thick layers, or monolayers confined on or inside templates. Here we report the exfoliation of single-atom-thick gold achieved through wet-chemically etching away Ti 3 C 2 from nanolaminated Ti 3 AuC 2 , initially formed by substituting Si in Ti 3 SiC 2 with Au. Ti 3 SiC 2 is a renown MAX phase, where M is a transition metal, A is a group A element, and X is C or N. Our developed synthetic route is by a facile, scalable and hydrofluoric acid-free method. The two-dimensional layers are termed goldene. Goldene layers with roughly 9% lattice contraction compared to bulk gold are observed by electron microscopy. While ab initio molecular dynamics simulations show that two-dimensional goldene is inherently stable, experiments show some curling and agglomeration, which can be mitigated by surfactants. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy reveals an Au 4f binding energy increase of 0.88 eV. Prospects for preparing goldene from other non-van der Waals Au-intercalated phases, including developing etching schemes, are presented.
Precisely! Anders Törneholm explains:
According to researchers from Linköping University, Sweden, this has given the gold new properties that can make it suitable for use in applications such as carbon dioxide conversion, hydrogen production, and production of value-added chemicals.
Scientists have long tried to make single-atom-thick sheets of gold but failed because the metal's tendency to lump together. But researchers from Linköping University have now succeeded thanks to a hundred-year-old method used by Japanese smiths.
"If you make a material extremely thin, something extraordinary happens – as with graphene. The same thing happens with gold. As you know, gold is usually a metal, but if single-atom-layer thick, the gold can become a semiconductor instead," says Shun Kashiwaya, researcher at the Materials Design Division at Linköping University.
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