Hematene joins parade of new 2D materials

In the wake of its recent discovery of a flat form of gallium, an international team led by scientists from Rice University has created another two-dimensional material that the researchers said could be a game changer for solar fuel generation.

Rice materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan and colleagues extracted 3-atom-thick hematene from common iron ore. Hematene may be an efficient photocatalyst, especially for splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, and could also serve as an ultrathin magnetic material for spintronic-based devices, the researchers said. The research was introduced in a paper in Nature Nanotechnology.

“2D magnetism is becoming a very exciting field with recent advances in synthesizing such materials, but the synthesis techniques are complex and the materials’ stability is limited,” Ajayan said. “Here, we have a simple, scalable method, and the hematene structure should be environmentally stable.”

Read more at Rice University

Image Credit: Shyam Sinha a Peter van Aken

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