High-Efficiency Exfoliation of Atomically-Thin Non-Van Der Waals Quasicrystal Nanosheets with Enhanced...

Two-dimensional (2D) nanomaterials of quasicrystals are highly desirable as these materials may have novel physical laws and properties that the 2D crystalline materials do not have, since the crystal structures of quasicrystals are quite different from those of traditional crystals. However, producing quasicrystal nanosheets with high yield still remains challenging because quasicrystals are generally non-van der Waals (n-vdW) solids with strong chemical bonds between constituent atoms, which makes them difficult to exfoliate. Here, an efficient liquid-phase shear exfoliation (LPSE) method is developed to successfully produce atomically-thin Al₇₄Co₁₅Ni₁₁ quasicrystal nanosheets with a gram-scale collection. More importantly, this method is also efficient for producing quasicrystal 2D nanomaterials in other quasicrystal alloys, implying its universality. Notably, the Al₇₄Co₁₅Ni₁₁ quasicrystal nanosheets exhibit excellent performance in electrocatalytic oxygen evolution reaction (OER), providing a promising application of quasicrystal materials.