Melting isn't always as simple as solid-to-liquid!

We are proud to share that our colleagues, David Lamprecht and Lado Filipovic, alongside partners from the University of Vienna, have published a breakthrough study in Science.

For the first time, they have observed the "hexatic phase" in a covalent two-dimensional material. By sandwiching a monolayer of silver iodide (AgI) with graphene, the team captured the precise moment the crystal lattice begins to melt.

Using advanced electron microscopy combined with neural networks to track thousands of atoms, they confirmed this elusive intermediate state, where the material retains orientational order but loses translational order, proving that 2D melting follows mostly the pathway predicted by the KTHNY theory.

Read the full paper, entitled "Hexatic phase in covalent two-dimensional silver iodide," here.