Atomically Thin Gold Films Now Made at Wafer Scale for Flexible Electronics

Gold has long been prized for its conductivity, chemical stability and optical brilliance, but turning it into a film only a few atoms thick has remained one of materials science’s most stubborn challenges. Now a team reporting in Advanced Science has demonstrated a way to fabricate continuous, transferable sheets of ultrathin gold across entire six-inch wafers, with thicknesses reaching just 1.5 nanometres. The achievement merges two techniques borrowed from different corners of nanoscience, template stripping and the polymer-assisted transfer methods developed for graphene, and yields films whose transparency and conductivity rival the industry-standard transparent conductor indium tin oxide. The researchers went on to weave their gold sheets into flexible organic light-emitting diodes, infrared thermal camouflage devices and electronic tattoos that record heart and muscle signals with higher fidelity than clinical gel electrodes.

The central obstacle is thermodynamic. Gold’s surface free energy is roughly 1.12 joules per square metre, an order of magnitude higher than that of graphene under ambient conditions. When gold atoms are deposited onto ordinary substrates such as silicon dioxide, this high surface energy drives them to clump together into three-dimensional islands rather than spreading out into a flat layer, a behaviour known as Volmer-Weber growth. The result is a discontinuous scatter of metallic droplets rather than the uniform, layer-by-layer Frank-van der Merwe film needed for a usable ultrathin conductor. Previous attempts to force flat growth relied on seed layers or adhesion promoters that permanently bonded the gold to its growth substrate, destroying the transferability that device integration demands, or produced films whose roughness was inherited from an imperfect underlying surface.

The team’s solution begins with the growth template itself. Instead of evaporating copper onto a support, where the columnar grain structure of the deposited metal imposes its own roughness, the researchers created a freestanding copper foil by template stripping. A 500-nanometre copper layer was first evaporated onto a single-crystal silicon (111) wafer, electroplated to a self-supporting thickness of 30 to 60 micrometres, and then peeled away. The gold-facing surface of the foil inherits the atomic flatness of the silicon wafer beneath it. Atomic force microscopy revealed terraced, essentially featureless copper with a root-mean-square roughness of just 0.24 nanometres over a four-micrometre scan, dropping to 0.16 nanometres at higher magnification. Because the deposited gold faithfully replicates the copper relief, this suppression of template corrugation proved to be the decisive factor enabling continuous gold films down to 1.5 nanometres, compared with a previous lower bound of 3.5 nanometres.

The choice of copper is not merely a matter of smoothness but of energetics. The adsorption energy of gold atoms on copper, approximately 7.78 joules per square metre, comfortably exceeds twice the surface free energy of gold, satisfying the thermodynamic criterion for two-dimensional, layer-by-layer growth. On silicon dioxide, by contrast, the adsorption energy is far too low, and islanding is inevitable. Molecular dynamics simulations made this contrast vivid: gold atoms deposited onto the copper template self-assembled into a uniform, highly crystalline monolayer even under deliberately anisotropic deposition conditions, while the same atoms landing on silicon coalesced into disordered, discrete islands. High-resolution electron microscopy of three-nanometre films confirmed the picture experimentally, showing a continuous, featureless surface on copper-derived films against percolated networks on molybdenum disulfide and classic island morphologies on bare oxide.

Direct evidence for layer-by-layer growth came from a strikingly simple test. The researchers deposited a nominal one-nanometre gold layer, a regime where island formation is most pronounced on conventional substrates, and re-examined the surface. The roughness barely changed, rising only from 0.16 to 0.18 nanometres, with no discrete islands visible. After transfer to silicon dioxide substrates, films ranging from two to eight nanometres in thickness remained continuous and uniform, with roughness below 0.4 nanometres and only rare pinholes in the thinnest sample. Transmission electron microscopy of a suspended three-nanometre membrane revealed a polycrystalline structure with crystalline domains often exceeding 20 nanometres laterally, several times larger than the film itself, and lattice fringes spaced about 0.24 nanometres apart, the signature of close-packed gold (111) planes.

The optical and electrical performance places these films among the best ultrathin transparent conductors yet reported. Peak transmittance climbed monotonically as thickness decreased, reaching 86.6 percent for the 1.5-nanometre film, up from 80 percent in the team’s earlier work, while sheet resistance for the thicker films fell to 14.9 ohms per square at five nanometres and 7.8 ohms per square at eight nanometres, approaching the theoretical limits for bulk crystalline gold. Spectroscopic ellipsometry showed that the dielectric function of films from three to eight nanometres closely tracks that of bulk gold, with a plasma frequency within six percent of the bulk value, quantitative evidence of a near-bulk free-electron density and minimal defects. Benchmarked against previous ultrathin gold, multilayer chemical-vapour-deposition graphene and commercial indium tin oxide, the films occupy a leading position on the standard transparency-conductivity figure of merit.

Electrical transport in the thinnest films is governed by the physics of reduced dimensionality. Because the film thickness is far smaller than the roughly 40-nanometre electron mean free path in bulk gold, surface and grain-boundary scattering dominate the resistivity. A combined Fuchs-Sondheimer and Mayadas-Shatzkes model, with physically reasonable parameters for specular surface scattering and grain-boundary reflection, matched the measured data across the two-to-eight-nanometre range. Flexibility testing showed that a five-nanometre film on plastic survived 1,000 bending cycles at a radius of about three millimetres with only a minimal increase in sheet resistance, a resilience that underpins the device demonstrations that followed.

Those demonstrations span photonics, thermal management and biomedicine. An eight-nanometre gold film served as the transparent anode in solution-processed organic light-emitting diodes, which outperformed identical devices built on commercial indium tin oxide, likely because gold presents a lower energy barrier of 0.1 electron-volts to the hole-injection layer, and because the atomically smooth anode eliminates the protrusions that can short-circuit the roughly 100-nanometre organic stack. The team also fabricated an eight-by-eight matrix-addressable transparent OLED display on flexible plastic at six-inch scale. For thermal camouflage, the same films exploit a dual property: high visible transparency preserves the object’s appearance, while high infrared reflectivity suppresses thermal emission, in accordance with Kirchhoff’s law. A five-nanometre gold coating reduced the apparent temperature seen by an infrared camera to about a third of the actual background temperature, a roughly 30 percent improvement over the team’s earlier rougher films, and a gold-polymer laminate concealed a satellite-shaped object from thermal imaging while remaining visually transparent.

Perhaps the most striking application is on human skin. Transferred as electronic tattoos, five- and twenty-nanometre gold electrodes conformed to the forearm and maintained stable impedance across repeated measurements, with values at 10 kilohertz of 20.3 and 10.5 kilohms respectively, comparable to state-of-the-art graphene electronic tattoos. When used to record electrocardiograms and electromyograms, the gold tattoos achieved signal-to-noise ratios of 14.9 and 69.5 decibels, exceeding the 12.7 and 62.4 decibels obtained from clinical silver-silver-chloride gel electrodes. The researchers attribute this advantage to the exceptional mechanical conformability of the ultrathin films, which yields intimate skin contact, minimises motion artefacts and outweighs the electrodes’ higher intrinsic impedance. Looking forward, the team notes that the same template-stripping and transfer paradigm should extend to other quasi-two-dimensional metals such as silver, palladium and platinum, while single-crystal copper templates and alternative stabilising interfaces based on sulfur-containing materials may push continuous metallic films toward the one-nanometre threshold, opening a broad new library of atomically thin metals for next-generation technologies.

Subject of Research: Wafer-scale synthesis and transfer of atomically thin continuous gold films for optoelectronics, thermal management and bio-interfaces

Article Title: Wafer‐Scale Atomically‐Thin Gold: Transferable Platform for Flexible Optoelectronics, Thermal Management and Bio‐Interfaces

Article References: Yakubovsky, D., Mironov, M., Ermolaev, G., Khrebtov, A., Slavich, A., Narute, P., Chowdhury, P., Kirtaev, R., Khramtsov, I., Minnekhanov, A., Tselikov, G., Grudinin, D., Sidorova, M., Pak, N., Maslov, P., Vyshnevyy, A., Zhou, H., Kravets, V. G., Grigorenko, A. N., … Volkov, V. (2026). Wafer‐Scale Atomically‐Thin Gold: Transferable Platform for Flexible Optoelectronics, Thermal Management and Bio‐Interfaces. Advanced Science, 13(55), Article e76495. https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.76495

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1002/advs.76495

Keywords: ultrathin gold, 2D materials, template stripping, transparent electrodes, flexible electronics, OLEDs, thermal camouflage, electronic tattoos, epidermal electronics, Frank-van der Merwe growth, sheet resistance, wafer-scale fabrication