Exfoliation of a non-van der Waals material from iron ore hematite

Balan, A.; Radhakrishnan, S.; Woellner, C.; Sinha, S.; Deng, L.; de los Reyes, C.; Rao, B.; Paulose, M.; Neupane, R.; Apte, A.; Kochat, V.; Vajtai, R.; Harutyunyan, A.; Chu, C.; Costin, G.; Galvao, D.; Marti, A.; van Aken, P. A.; Varghese, O.; Tiwary, C.; Iyer, A.; Ajayan, P.

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Add to Basket

Local TagsRelease HistoryDetailsSummary

Released

Journal Article

Exfoliation of a non-van der Waals material from iron ore hematite

MPS-Authors

/persons/resource/persons280611

van Aken, P. A.
Scientific Facility Stuttgart Center for Electron Microscopy (Peter A. van Aken), Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, Max Planck Society;

External Resource

No external resources are shared

Fulltext (restricted access)

There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.

Fulltext (public)

There are no public fulltexts stored in PuRe

Supplementary Material (public)

There is no public supplementary material available

Citation

Balan, A., Radhakrishnan, S., Woellner, C., Sinha, S., Deng, L., de los Reyes, C., et al. (2018). Exfoliation of a non-van der Waals material from iron ore hematite. Nature Nanotechnology, 13(7), 602-609.

Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-000E-DA88-3

Abstract

With the advent of graphene, the most studied of all two-dimensional materials, many inorganic analogues have been synthesized and are being exploited for novel applications. Several approaches have been used to obtain large-grain, high-quality materials. Naturally occurring ores, for example, are the best precursors for obtaining highly ordered and large-grain atomic layers by exfoliation. Here, we demonstrate a new two-dimensional material 'hematene' obtained from natural iron ore hematite (alpha-Fe2O3), which is isolated by means of liquid exfoliation. The two-dimensional morphology of hematene is confirmed by transmission electron microscopy. Magnetic measurements together with density functional theory calculations confirm the ferromagnetic order in hematene while its parent form exhibits antiferromagnetic order. When loaded on titania nanotube arrays, hematene exhibits enhanced visible light photocatalytic activity. Our study indicates that photogenerated electrons can be transferred from hematene to titania despite a band alignment unfavourable for charge transfer.