For centuries, goldsmiths have sought ways to flatten gold into ever finer forms. An approach based in modern chemistry has finally created a gold material that literally can’t get any thinner, consisting of a single layer of atoms.

Sticking to the naming conventions of materials science, researchers have named this new two-dimensional material ‘goldene’, and it has some interesting properties not seen in the three-dimensional form of gold.

“If you make a material extremely thin, something extraordinary happens – as with graphene,” explains materials scientist Shun Kashiwaya of Linköping University in Sweden.