It is called “Goldeno” and has unusual properties

A team of scientists has created one-atom-thick sheets of gold for the first time, giving the metal new properties with multiple applications such as producing hydrogen or making value-added chemicals. It is 'golden'.

By: Clarion

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 a very thin material, something extraordinary happens, and that's gold. As is known, gold is normally a metal, but if it is a layer one atom thick, it becomes a semiconductor,” explains Shun Kashiwaya, researcher at Linköping University and lead author of the study.

To create Goldeno, the team used a three-dimensional base material in which gold is sandwiched between layers of titanium and carbon, although part of the success was down to luck, says Lars Hultmann, a professor at Linköping.

Such gold was found by chance

“We've developed a basic material idea that has completely different applications. We start with an electrically conductive ceramic called titanium silicon carbide on thin layers of silicon. So the idea was to coat the material with gold to make a contact. But when we exposed the components to high temperatures, the silicon layer Replaced by gold within the base material,” he explains.

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