2024-04-18 00:33:59
They created a new type of gold: it is called goldeno and it has extraordinary properties.
For the first time, a team of researchers has succeeded in making gold plates that are one atom thick, thereby giving this metal new properties with several areas of use such as the production of hydrogen or the production of value-added chemicals. That is the “golden”.
Of: Clarion
The details of the discovery, made by researchers at Linköping University (Sweden), were published this Tuesday in the journal Nature Synthesis.
As with graphene, “if you make an extremely thin material, something extraordinary happens, even with gold. As is known, gold is usually a metal, but if it has a layer one atom thick, it can become a semiconductor, explains Shun Kashiwaya, researcher at Linköping University and lead author of the study.
To create the goldeno, the team used a three-dimensional base material in which gold is embedded between layers of titanium and carbon, although part of the success is due to luck, says Lars Hultman, professor at Linköping.
They came across this kind of gold by accident
“We had made the base material with completely different applications in mind. We start with an electrically conductive ceramic called titanium silicon carbide, where the silicon is in thin layers. So the idea was to coat the material with gold to make a contact. But when we exposed the component to high temperatures, the silicon layer was replaced by gold in the base material, he explains.
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