In this article by Live Science, we discover that scientists have created the world's thinnest gold leaf, which is just a single atom thick.
The new material, dubbed "goldene" could have important applications in carbon dioxide conversion and hydrogen generation, the researchers said. To make goldene, the team employed a 100-year-old technique used by Japanese iron smiths to isolate single layers of the precious metal. They reported their work in the journal Nature Synthesis on April 16.
Researchers are particularly interested in two-dimensional materials because of their unusual optical, electronic and catalytic properties. The extremely high surface area of these substances relative to their volume means they behave very differently than chemically-identical bulk solids, and numerous examples of 2D materials have been reported since the discovery of graphene in 2004.
However, most of these materials are prepared from nonmetals or mixed compounds, and creating single-atom sheets of pure metals is much more challenging.
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