Chinese scientists have recently succeeded in creating single-atom-layer metals with a thickness of just one 200,000th of the diameter of a human hair, an achievement expected to pioneer a new realm of two-dimensional (2D) metal research and trigger material innovation.

The study was conducted by a research team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Physics (IOP) and was published in the latest issue of the Nature academic journal.

Since the discovery of monolayer graphene in 2004, 2D materials have revolutionized our understanding of materials and driven breakthroughs in condensed matter physics and material science. Over the past 20 years, the family of 2D materials has expanded rapidly, including hundreds of experimentally accessible 2D materials and nearly 2,000 theoretically predicted materials.

However, the creation of 2D metals has been extremely difficult due to the strong metallic bonds between atoms in all directions, said Zhang Guangyu, a leading scientist on the IOP research team.

By developing an atomic-scale manufacturing method, the van der Waals squeezing method, the research team was able to create diverse 2D metals, including bismuth, tin, lead, indium and gallium.

"The thickness of these 2D metals is just one millionth of a piece of A4 paper and one 200,000th of the diameter of a human hair. If a 3-meter-long metal cube were pressed into a single-atom layer, it would cover the entire ground surface of Beijing," Zhang said.

International reviewers have hailed this work as a major advance in the study of 2D materials.

Du Luojun, a member of the research team, said that this achievement fills a significant gap in the 2D materials family and will promote theoretical, experimental and technological advances.

"Just as 3D metals drove the copper, bronze and iron ages, 2D metals could propel the next stage of human civilization, bringing technological innovations in numerous fields, such as ultra-micro low-power transistors, high-frequency devices, transparent displays, ultra-sensitive detection and highly efficient catalysis," Zhang said.