Stability and Exfoliation of Germanane: A Germanium Graphane Analogue

Graphene's success has shown not only that it is possible to create stable, single-atom-thick sheets from a crystalline solid but that these materials have fundamentally different properties than the parent material. We have synthesized for the first time, millimeter-scale crystals of a hydrogen-terminated germanium multilayered graphane analogue (germanane, GeH) from the topochemical deintercalation of CaGe2. This layered van der Waals solid is analogous to multilayered graphane (CH). The surface layer of GeH only slowly oxidizes in air over the span of 5 months, while the underlying layers are resilient to oxidation based on X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy…