Chinese scientists have found a way to squeeze metals into ultra-thin sheets – no more than a few atoms thick.
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Some experts believe the feat could revolutionise the way electronic devices are made, from low-power transistors to next-generation chips and supersensitive detectors.
Drawing inspiration from ancient copper-forging techniques, a team from the Institute of Physics at the Chinese Academy of Physics in Beijing produced sheets of bismuth, gallium, indium, tin and lead that were in some cases just one atom thick – hundreds of thousands of times thinner than a human hair.
In an article published in the journal Nature on Thursday, the researchers said that compared to their bulkier counterparts, their ultra-thin metal sheets – especially one-atom-thick bismuth – showed exceptionally high electrical conductivity, among other unique properties.
Javier Sanchez-Yamagishi, a specialist in two-dimensional (2D) materials at the University of California, Irvine, said that while the Chinese team was not the first to produce atomically thin metals, their results stood out because the new method produces “large-scale, truly 2D metals” compared to previous techniques.
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“The stability and large sizes of these materials open up many possibilities for integrating them with other materials and for making new electrical or photonic devices,” Sanchez-Yamagishi wrote in a review article in Nature.
Scientists have long known that 2D materials can show vastly different properties from their 3D counterparts, even with the same chemical composition. For instance, a single-atom-thick sheet of carbon, known as graphene, is far stronger and more conductive than the graphite in pencil tips.