As the magazine Spiegel reports, researchers in Sweden have for the first time produced a sheet of gold that consists of just one layer of atoms - and is therefore two-dimensional. They were aided by a Japanese goldsmith's technique that is more than a hundred years old.
The discovery was made by chance: Lars Hultman and Shun Kashiwaya were in the process of coating titanium silicon carbide with gold. The scientists at Linköping University had not expected what happened next:
The gold penetrated the material, displaced the silicon and became a kind of foil made of just a single row of atoms. The two scientists and their team had produced a so-called two-dimensional gold layer - a task at which science had previously failed. Very thin layers of gold actually have a tendency to clump together. The team from Linköping University has now overcome this obstacle. They call the new material "Golden".
A task that science had previously failed at
But the next difficulty was already waiting for them: The gold layer had to be exposed, but after the surprising reaction it was embedded in titanium carbide, which is one of the hardest substances there is. To do this, the researchers tried out a technique used by Japanese blacksmiths that is more than a hundred years old and were successful. The goldsmith's technique not only works to remove carbon-containing residues from steel, but also to remove gold from its ceramic coating.
Source: Shun Kashiwaya et al: Synthesis of gold comprising single-atom layer gold, Nature Synthesis, online April 16, 2024; DOI: 10.1038/s44160-024-00518-4
