Extraction of Two-Dimensional Aluminum Alloys from Decagonal Quasicrystals

Thakur Prasad Yadav; Cristiano F Woellner; Tiva Sharifi; Shyam Kanta Sinha; Lu-Lu Qu; Amey Apte; N K Mukhopadhyay; O N Srivastava; Robert Vajtai; Douglas Soares Galvão; Chandra Sekhar Tiwary; Pulickel M Ajayan

doi:10.1021/acsnano.0c03081

Extraction of Two-Dimensional Aluminum Alloys from Decagonal Quasicrystals

ACS Nano. 2020 Jun 23;14(6):7435-7443. doi: 10.1021/acsnano.0c03081. Epub 2020 Jun 9.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Department of Materials Science and NanoEngineering, Rice University, Houston, Texas 77005, United States.
² Department of Physics, Institute of Science, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi 221005, India.
³ Physics Department, Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), Curitiba, PR, Brazil.
⁴ Department of Materials Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560012, India.
⁵ School of Chemistry and Materials Science, Jiangsu Normal University, Xuzhou 221116, People's Republic of China.
⁶ Department of Metallurgical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (Banaras Hindu University), Varanasi 221 005, India.
⁷ Applied Physics Department and Center of Computational Engineering and Science, University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Campinas, SP, Brazil.
⁸ Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur 721302, India.

PMID: 32469491
DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.0c03081

Abstract

Atomically thin metallic alloys are receiving increased attention due to their prospective applications as interconnects/contacts in two-dimensional (2D) circuits, sensors, and catalysts, among others. In this work, we demonstrate an easily scalable technique for the synthesis of 2D metallic alloys from their 3D quasicrystalline precursors. We have used aluminum (Al)-based single-phase decagonal quasicrystal Al₆₆Co₁₇Cu₁₇ alloy to extract the corresponding 2D alloy structure. The 2D layered Al alloy possesses 2-fold decagonal quasicrystalline symmetry and consists of two- or three-layer-thick sheets with a lateral dimension of microns. These 2D metallic layers were combined with the atomic layers of tungsten disulfide to form the stacked heterostructures, which is demonstrated to be a stable and efficient catalyst for hydrogen evolution reaction.

Keywords: decagonal phase; hydrogen evolution; microscopy; quasicrystal; quasicrystalline monolayer; two-dimensional aluminum alloys; two-dimensional materials.