A new family of two-dimensional materials was developed by a team from the Tulane University School of Science and Engineering which has great use in advanced electronics and high-capacity batteries.
It is been published in the journal Advanced Materials by Michael Naguib, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Engineering Physics.
Naguib said that two-dimensional materials are nanomaterials with thickness in the nanometer size (nanometer is one millionth of a millimeter) and lateral dimensions thousands of times the thickness and their flatness is a special property as compared to bulk materials.
Transition metal carbo-chalcogenides, or TMCC is the title for the new family as it integrates the qualities of two families-transition metal carbides and transition metal dichalcogenides.
Transition metal dichalcogenides is a wide family of materials and has been explored broadly. It is been mainly used in electrochemical energy storage and conversion and its major issue is low electrical conductivity and stability while the former ones are great electrical conductors with significant conductivity. The merging of these two families is predicted to have eminent potential such as batteries and supercapacitors, catalysis, sensors and electronics.
Naquib told that instead of stacking the two various materials such as Lego building blocks with numerous problematic interfaces so we developed a new 2D material which has both compositions without any interface.
Ahmad Majed, the first author of the article and a doctoral candidate in Materials Physics and Engineering at Tulane working in Naguib's group said that they used an electrochemical-assisted exfoliation process by putting lithium ions in-between the layers of bulk transition metals carbo-chalcogenides then by agitation in water.
Majid said that making these materials is simple and scalable unlike others.
The team includes Jiang Wei with the others two, who is an associate professor in physics and engineering physics; Jianwei Sun, an assistant professor in physics and engineering physics; Ph.D. candidates Kaitlyn Prenger, Manish Kothakonda and Fei Wang at Tulane; and Dr. Eric N. Tseng and professor Per O.A. Persson of Linkӧping University in Sweden.
Reference: Ahmad Majed et al, Transition Metal Carbo‐Chalcogenide "TMCC" a New Family of Two‐dimensional Materials, Advanced Materials (2022).
Journal information: Advanced Materials
by Tushar Gupta
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