Researchers accidentally created “goldene”, a revolutionary two-dimensional material with unique semiconductor properties, revealing new potential in a variety of applications.
Goldsmiths have long dealt with the challenge of processing gold into finer forms, which has now led to the creation of a revolutionary material – “goldene“. It is a one-dimensional material composed of only one layer of gold atoms, reports Zimo.
Following the conventions of materials science, scientists have coined the name “goldene” for this innovation, which exhibits unique properties that gold does not have in its three-dimensional counterpart.
If you make the material extremely thin, something extraordinary happens – just like with graphene, points out Shun Kashiwaya, a materials scientist at Linköping University in Sweden.
He explains that gold can become a semiconductor when reduced to a layer thickness of just one atom.
Despite gold’s natural tendency to shrink, previous efforts to create a two-dimensional configuration have failed, yielding multi-Atotic plates or monolayers inseparable from other materials.
The breakthrough, however, came unexpectedly for Kashiwaya and his team as they experimented with another material, an electrically conductive ceramic, titanium silicon carbide.
We started with an electrically conductive ceramic called titanium silicon carbide, where the silicon is in thin layers.
Then the idea was to coat the material with gold to make contact.
But when we exposed the component to high temperature, the silicon layer was replaced by gold within the base material, explains materials physicist Lars Hultman from Linköping University.
Their challenge lay in extracting super-thin layers of gold between the layers of titanium and carbon surrounding it.
Overcoming this obstacle required a technique involving Murakami’s reagent, a metalworking solution that etches carbon and changes the color of steel.
By experimenting with different concentrations and time frames, they successfully removed the surrounding materials, leaving the gold layer intact.
However, the process was delicate, requiring darkness to prevent the release of cyanide from the by-product of said solution.
In addition, a surfactant (a surface-active substance that reduces the tension of a liquid) is introduced to prevent curling up or lumping of the gold layer.
The resulting stable golden exhibits semiconductor properties, offering new possibilities in fields such as water purification and chemical production, N1 writes.
