In nature, gold can take many different shapes, but research using modern chemistry has led to the creation of the thinnest shape ever seen. Scientists have developed a gold material composed of a single layer of atoms.
If this composition sounds familiar to you, you are not alone; the researchers have in fact decided to maintain tradition and call the new material “goldene”. “If you make a material extremely thin, it will exhibit extraordinary characteristics – as with the graphene,” explains scientist Shun Kashiwaya.
Just like graphene, in fact, too monatomic gold It has remarkable properties. We already know that this element is an excellent conductor of electricity, but when converted into a two-dimensional plate it becomes a semiconductor, exhibiting the qualities of both a conductor and an insulator. This is extremely useful, as it means that its conductivity can be adjusted at will.
But how did the research team manage to create this shape? In reality, Kashiwaya and his colleagues found themselves there almost by chance: “we created the base material with completely different applications in mind,” says physicist Lars Hultman.
“We started with a conductive ceramic made of titanium carbides and silicon, where the silicon is in thin layers. The idea was to cover it with gold to make contact, but once subjected to high temperatures, the gold replaced the silicon layer inside the base material.”
The result is therefore something never achieved before (given the difficulty of processing gold) and this new material could become extremely sought after for chemical applications and as regards semiconductors.
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