Bridge Doping Unlocks Hidden Pathways in Liquid Metal Chemistry

Figure 1. (a) ‘Bridge doping’ mechanism for dissolution of insoluble nonmetals and metalloids in liquid metals using secondary elements with cross solubility. Illustrations of (b) ‘top-to-bottom’ and (c) ‘bottom-to-top’ strategies for the ‘bridge doping’ concept (gray: liquid metal, orange: nonmetals or metalloids insoluble in liquid metals, green: secondary element with solubility in both liquid metal and nonmetal/metalloid). The surface of liquid metal might naturally deviate from the core in following the classical phase diagrams. Spatiotemporal clustering and localized enrichment may occur in liquid metals, leading to surface differs incredibly from the core. The potential supercooling after alloying might affect the atomically dispersed state of dopants in liquid metals. Liquid metals stay dynamically layered near the surface, which further complicates dopant incorporation. Figure 2. Role of different secondary elements in the bridge solubility of C, F, S, P, B, and Si elements in liquid metals. Green and red arrows show solubility and insolubility, respectively, while the blue arrow indicates the bridge solubility between secondary elements and liquid metals. Dr. Mohammad Bagher Ghasemian received his PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from UNSW Sydney in 2018. He is currently a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Sydney and a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Chemical Engineering at UNSW Sydney. Previously, he worked as a researcher at the Centre for Smart Supramolecules at Pohang University of Science & Technology (POSTECH), South Korea, and as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Solid and Liquid Based Electronics and Optics at UNSW Sydney. His research focuses on liquid metals for the preparation and fabrication of functional materials, including nanostructures and 2D materials, with potential applications in photocatalysis, sensing, flexible devices, optics, and electronics. Dr. Francois-Marie Allioux is a Research Fellow in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Sydney. He was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Chemical Engineering at UNSW Sydney. He received his PhD in Materials Science in 2017 from the Institute for Frontier Materials, Deakin University (Geelong, Australia), and a Master’s degree in Chemical Engineering from Université Paul Sabatier (Toulouse, France). His research centres on low-melting-point and liquid-metal systems for environmental processes and technologies. Kourosh Kalantar-Zadeh is a Professor at the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Sydney. He is also one of the Australian Research Council Laureate Fellows of 2018. Professor Kalantar-Zadeh was a professor of Chemical Engineering at UNSW, and prior to that a Professor of Electronic Engineering at RMIT, Australia. Professor Kalantar-Zadeh is involved in research in the fields of analytical chemistry, materials sciences, gastroenterology, electronics and sensors, and has coauthored of >500 highly cited scientific papers. He is a member of the editorial boards of journals including ACS Applied Nano Materials (associate editor), ACS Sensors, Advanced Materials Technologies, Nanoscale, Applied Surface Science and ACS Nano. Professor Kalantar-Zadeh is best known for his works on ingestible sensors, liquid metals and two-dimensional semiconductors. He led his group to the invention of an ingestible chemical sensor: human gas sensing capsule, one of the breakthroughs in the field of medical devices. Professor Kalantar-Zadeh has received several international awards for his scientific contributions including the 2017 IEEE Sensor Council Achievement, 2018 American Chemical Society Advances in Measurement Science Lectureship awards and 2020 Robert Boyle Prize of Royal Society of Chemistry. The authors would like to acknowledge the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project Grant DP230102813 and Discovery Project Grant DP240101086. This article references 27 other publications. This document has been updated Click for further information. This article has not yet been cited by other publications.