Two-dimensional silica (2D silica) is a layered polymorph of

silicon dioxide Silicon dioxide, also known as silica, is an oxide of silicon with the chemical formula , commonly found in nature as quartz. In many parts of the world, silica is the major constituent of sand. Silica is one of the most complex and abundan ...

. Two varieties of 2D silica, both of hexagonal crystal symmetry, have been grown so far on various metal substrates. One is based on SiO₄ tetrahedra, which are

covalently A covalent bond is a chemical bond that involves the sharing of electrons to form electron pairs between atoms. These electron pairs are known as shared pairs or bonding pairs. The stable balance of attractive and repulsive forces between atoms ...

bonded to the substrate. The second comprises

graphene Graphene () is a carbon allotrope consisting of a Single-layer materials, single layer of atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice, honeycomb planar nanostructure. The name "graphene" is derived from "graphite" and the suffix -ene, indicating ...

-like fully saturated sheets, which interact with the substrate via weak van der Waals bonds. One sheet of the second 2D silica variety is also called hexagonal bilayer silica (HBS); it can have either ordered or disordered (amorphous) structure. 2D silica has potential applications in electronics as the thinnest gate dielectric. It can also be used for isolation of graphene sheets from the substrate. 2D silica is a wide band gap semiconductor, whose band gap and geometry can be engineered by external electric field. It was shown to be a member of the auxetics materials family with a negative Poisson's ratio.

References

Two-dimensional nanomaterials Silicon dioxide Silica polymorphs {{nano-tech-stub