>"“We had created the base material with completely different applications in mind. We started with an electrically conductive ceramics called titanium silicon carbide, where silicon is in thin layers. Then the idea was to coat the material with gold to make a contact. But when we exposed the component to high temperature, the silicon layer was replaced by gold inside the base material,” says Lars Hultman.
This phenomenon is called intercalation and what the researchers had discovered was titanium gold carbide."
Hmm, never knew about Intercalation before this... let's learn more about it!:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercalation_(chemistry)
>"By 2023, all commercial Li-ion cells use intercalation compounds as active materials"
OK, so Intercalation appears to be deeply related to the principle of energy storage (of which one specific subcase is Li-ion batteries...)
Also, there's this:
>"“If you make a material extremely thin, something extraordinary happens – as with graphene. The same thing happens with gold. As you know, gold is usually a metal, but if single-atom-layer thick, the gold can become a semiconductor instead,” says Shun Kashiwaya, researcher at the Materials Design Division at Linköping University."
If this is the case -- then the following would be an interesting question for all students of Chemistry, present and future:
Can all Periodic Table Elements -- be turned into semiconductors (specifically transistors) -- if they are only a single atom layer thick?
?
And, a follow-up set of questions (once that's known):
If any Elements cannot -- then which ones, exactly, cannot, and why exactly, can they not be?
?
???
(You know -- for all of the Chem majors out there! )