Hexagon Salt: Common Table Salt May One Day Power Electric Cars

Scientists from Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) in Russia alongside the Mainz Institute for Theoretical Physics (MITP) in Germany have created the existence of exotic salt in the shape of a hexagon.

Although chemically the salt is still sodium chloride (NaCl), the creating of hexagon salt is not made for diners, but for things such as radar equipment and electric cars. Researchers have accomplished this by getting a thin film layer of hexagonal salt atop a layer of diamond substrate - where a reaction occurs between the film and layer of diamond.

The authors stated that 'NaCl is one of the simplest compounds and was thought to be well-understood, and yet, unexpected complexities related to it were uncovered at high pressure and in low-dimensional states.'

Sodium chloride, or table salt, is one of the most common and used materials. Typically, the thermodynamic stable phase of table salt is a cubic crystal structure. Thermodynamics refers to the relationships between heat and other forms of energy. This thermal energy converts to and from other forms of energy, affecting matter.

In the nanoscale, when pressure is increased, the thin cubic films split into graphitic-like films, making the structure more linear. Seeing this made the scientists wonder how they can experimentally grow and multiply the. sodium chloride thin films.

Stable Diamond

The substrate, a stabilizer, is what's crucial for the formation of exotic 2D structures, in this case, a diamond substrate for the hexagon salt. Kseniya Tikhomirova, a material scientist from Skoltech, shared that 'initially we decided to perform only a computational study of the formation of new 2D structures on different substrates, driven by the hypothesis that if a substrate interacts strongly with the NaCl thin film, one can expect major changes in the structure of the thin film.'

'Indeed, we obtained very interesting results and predicted the formation of a hexagonal NaCl film on the diamond substrate, and decided to perform experiments. Thanks to our colleagues who performed the experiments, we synthesized this hexagonal NaCl, which proves our theory,' continued Tikhomirova.

An algorithm by the Universal Structure Predictor: Evolutionary Xtallography (USPEX) was used to 'predict low-energy crystal structures based on the chemical elements used to make them.' The team then had to prove a hypothesis about salt formation on top of a diamond substrate.

Salt-Powered Electronics

With success, they were able to create hexagon salt at about 6 nanometers thick, but you revert back to its cubic structure beyond that. Alexander Kvashnin from Skoltech confirmed that 'this shows that this simple and common compound, seemingly well-studied, hides many interesting phenomena, especially in nanoscale.'

With further research, it can lead to developments in diamond field-effect transistors (FET), which is used for high-powered electronics such as microwaves, electric vehicles, and telecommunication devices.

Kvashnin shares that 'our results show that the field of 2D materials is still very young, and scientists have discovered only a small portion of possible materials with intriguing properties-' hexagonal salt is just the start.