A glitzy holy grail in materials science has just been attained: scientists have created freestanding, single-atom-thick sheets of gold. This achievement is the first of its kind with any metal atoms, which seem to abhor flatness and typically insist on clustering into droplets or particles.
The method behind the new monolayer metal, dubbed goldene, could “expand the boundaries of what it’s possible to do with materials,” says Lars Hultman, a materials scientist at Linköping University in Sweden and senior author on a new study in Nature Synthesis on the technique. Gold is of particular interest, he adds, because its nanoparticles are already used in electronics, photonics, sensing, biomedicine, and more. The researchers expect that goldene will exhibit its own intriguing suite of new properties, like the single-atom sheets of carbon known as graphene have.
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