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Science & Tech.
Mahesh

06/05/24 19:35 PM IST

GOLDENE: A sheet of gold that is only one atom thick

In News
  • For the first time, researchers have created a free-standing sheet of gold that is only one atom thick.
  • This makes gold the first metal to be formulated into (freestanding) 2D sheets — opening up a host of exciting possibilities for the future.
About Goldene
  • Creating ‘goldene’, as the one-atom thick material has been named, was not easy for the scientists behind the development, from Sweden’s Linköping University .
  • It is not that such 2D materials have not been created before.
  • Since the 2004 development of graphene, the atom-thin material made of carbon, scientists have identified hundreds of 2D materials.
  • However, coming up with atom-thin metallic sheets has been a challenge, due to metals’ tendency to cluster together to make nanoparticles instead.
  • While scientists have previously produced gold sheets sandwiched between other materials, “goldene is the first free-standing 2D metal, to the best of our knowledge.
  • To create goldene, researchers first sandwiched an atomic monolayer of silicon between layers of titanium carbide.
  • When they deposited gold on top of this sandwich structure, the gold atoms diffused into the material and replaced the silicon atoms, forming a trapped monolayer of gold atoms.
  • Subsequently, scientists etched away the titanium carbide layers to create a free-standing, one atom thick layer of gold.
  • This was done with the help of an age-old Japanese technique used to forge katanas and high-quality knives, using a chemical popularly known as Murakami’s reagent.
  • According to Hultman’s estimates, these sheets of goldene are roughly 100 nanometres thick (a nanometre is a billionth of a metre), approximately 400 times thinner than the thinnest commercially available gold leaf.
Applications
  • Developing goldene is not for the purposes of scientific curiosity alone — far from it. Scientists believe that the super thin, super light material can potentially revolutionise the electronics industry.
  • Goldene holds promise as a great catalyst because it’s much more economically viable than thicker, three-dimensional gold.
  • You don’t need as many gold atoms to get the same function.
  • This means that electronics, which use gold due to its electrical conductivity, can potentially use lesser amounts for the same purpose.
  • Moreover, the technique used by the scientists to create goldene can, in theory, also be applicable to other metallic objects.
  • Goldene possibly also has some special properties, like other previously developed 2D materials.
  • This is due to the fact that each gold atom, in this case, has only six neighbouring atoms, compared to 12 in a three-dimensional crystal.
  • Scientists say that future applications could include carbon dioxide conversion, hydrogen-generating catalysis, selective production of value-added chemicals, hydrogen production, water purification, etc.
Source- Indian Express

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