Tarnishing Silver Metal into Mithrene

Silver metal exposed to the atmosphere corrodes and becomes tarnished as a result of oxidation and precipitation of the metal as an insoluble salt. Tarnish has so poor a reputation that the word itself connotes corruption and disrespectability; however, tarnishing is a facile synthetic approach for preparing thin metal-sulfide films on silver or copper metal that might be exploited to prepare more elaborate materials with desirable optoelectronic properties. In this work, we prepare luminescent semiconducting thin films of mithrene, a metal-organic chalcogenolate assembly, by replacing the tarnish-causing atmospheric sulfur source with diphenyl diselenide. Mithrene, or silver benzeneselenolate [AgSePh]_∞, is a crystalline solid that contains both an organic supramolecular phase and a two-dimensional inorganic coordination polymer phase. This compound gradually accumulates as the sole product of silver metal corrosion. The chemical reaction is carried out on metallic silver thin films and yields crystalline films with thicknesses ranging from 5 to 100 nm. We use the large-area films (>6 cm²) afforded by this method to measure the optical properties of this compound. The mild-temperature, wafer-scale processing of hybrid chalcogenolate thin films may prove useful in the application of hybrid organic-inorganic materials in semiconductor devices and hierarchical architectures.