Thomas Heine is Professor of Theoretical Chemistry at TU Dresden. Among experts, he is often referred to as the ‘magician of 2D materials.’ His colleagues and Nobel Prize winners Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov at the University of Manchester happened to discover graphene - the so-called two-dimensional miracle material by chance. Heine and his team, however, use computer simulation to discover new 2D materials with specific properties. He uses supercomputers to calculate the miracle materials for tomorrow's electronics. With his many impressive works, particularly in the field of materials science, he is one of the world's most cited scientists. He himself describes his work as a passion and kind of science fiction, which he then turns into science-based reality.

Due to his proven expertise, Heine was recently asked to contribute to a ‘News & Views’ article in the renowned scientific journal ‘Nature Materials’. In it, he analyses a current paper on metastable pentagonal 2D materials. Pentagons are - compared to rectangles or hexagons - rather unsuitable for the arrangement of atoms in two-dimensional materials due to their odd number of vertices, as they are usually unstable or metastable due to the lack of symmetry. An international research team has now succeeded in synthesizing the metastable pentagonal shape of the 2D material PtTe₂. A trick was used here; the pentagonal lattice can be projected onto a square one. In the (100) surface of the platinum crystal, the platinum atoms are arranged in a square lattice. This surface was used as a stabilizing substrate for the synthesis of the metastable pentagonal PtTe₂.

Metastable materials have received little attention to date, as they are not easy to produce. The clever trick described here of using the substrate for stabilization should also be suitable for the synthesis of other metastable materials, making them interesting for research and application.

Video about Thomas Heine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBOpplzPAh0

Original Publication:

Thomas Heine. Pentagonal two-dimensional lattices. News & Views, Nature Materials. DOI: 10.1038/s41563-024-01996-9

Contact:
Prof Dr Thomas Heine
TUD Dresden University of Technology
Chair of Theoretical Chemistry
Tel.: +49 351 463-37637
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