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February 09 2012
The Cliff of the Two-Dimensional World
Babak Anasori, Michael Naguib, Yury Gogotsi, Michel W. Barsoum
Drexel University
This landscape, which looks like a red-rock bluff straight out of Utah, isn't a geologic feature. Instead, it's a nanostructured material made from ultrathin layers of titanium-based compounds and seen under an electron microscope.
To construct the small outcropping, Babak Anasori and colleagues at Drexel University in Philadelphia used a technique called exfoliation. They placed Ti3AlC2 powders in a solution of hydrofluoric acid and stripped away the aluminum atoms. What remained were stacked layers of Ti3C2, seen here in false color, resembling stratigraphic mineral layers. These exfoliated layers, which the team dubbed MXenes, are so thin they are two-dimensional. In other words, each strip is only five atomic layers thick. The team is the first to render such materials in 2D. The MXenes could be used in energy storage devices, sensors, solar cells, and other applications, the team writes. And they could give the majesty of Arches National Park in Utah some nanoscale competition.This landscape, which looks like a red-rock bluff straight out of Utah, isn't a geologic feature. Instead, it's a nanostructured material made from ultrathin layers of titanium-based compounds and seen under an electron microscope.
science