New MXene Synthesis Method Delivers 160-Fold Conductivity Jump, Opening Path to Next-Generation Electronics
German researchers used molten salts and iodine vapor to build atomically ordered MXenes, boosting conductivity 160x over conventional methods.
Overview
Researchers at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) and TU Dresden have developed a synthesis technique that produces MXene sheets with near-perfect atomic order, achieving a 160-fold increase in electrical conductivity compared with material made by conventional methods. The work, published in Nature Synthesis in April 2026, addresses a long-standing bottleneck that has limited the real-world performance of one of the most studied families of two-dimensional materials.
What MXenes Are and Why They Matter
MXenes are a class of ultra-thin inorganic materials first discovered in 2011, composed of stacked transition metal layers combined with carbon or nitrogen. They have attracted broad interest because their electrical, optical, and mechanical properties can, in principle, be tuned by altering the atoms that coat their surfaces — a feature that makes them candidates for flexible electronics, high-speed communications hardware, radar-absorbing coatings, electromagnetic shielding, and energy storage devices.
The catch, as ScienceDaily reports, is that conventional synthesis routes leave surface atoms distributed randomly rather than in a controlled arrangement. “They strongly influence how electrons move through the material, how stable it is, and how it interacts with light, heat, and chemical environments,” said Dr. Mahdi Ghorbani-Asl of HZDR’s Institute of Ion Beam Physics and Materials Research. The disordered surfaces trap and scatter electrons — “much like potholes slowing traffic on a highway,” in the words of Dr. Dongqi Li of TU Dresden, co-author of the study.
The New Synthesis Approach
The team replaced traditional harsh chemical etching with a process they describe as a gas-liquid-solid (GLS) method. Solid MAX phase starting materials — layered ceramics from which MXenes are derived — are combined with molten salts and iodine vapor. The molten salts and iodine work in concert to control which halogen atoms (chlorine, bromine, or iodine) attach to the MXene surfaces, producing sheets with uniform, well-ordered terminations and sharply reduced impurities.
As phys.org notes, the approach is also versatile: the team demonstrated it across eight different MAX phase starting materials, suggesting the method is not limited to a single composition. The collaborating institutions included the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics Halle and several other European partner groups.
Performance Improvements
For the chlorine-terminated titanium carbide variant, Ti₃C₂Cl₂, the results were striking. According to ScienceDaily, compared with conventionally produced MXene of the same nominal composition, the new material showed:
- A 160-fold increase in macroscopic electrical conductivity
- A 13-fold enhancement in terahertz-range conductivity
- A nearly fourfold increase in charge carrier mobility
The chlorine-terminated samples showed no detectable surface impurities, which the researchers attribute directly to the reduction in electron scattering and trapping.
Because the surface halogen also shifts how the material interacts with electromagnetic radiation, the GLS approach opens a tunable route to radar-absorbing and electromagnetic-shielding materials whose properties could be dialed in by choice of halogen termination — chlorine, bromine, or iodine — rather than by fabricating an entirely new compound.
Significance and Limitations
The conductivity figures represent laboratory measurements on synthesized samples rather than performance in a manufactured device. MXenes face additional engineering challenges — including integration into fabrication processes compatible with existing semiconductor infrastructure — before any commercial application. Stability over time and at elevated temperatures is also a known concern for the material class.
Nevertheless, the scale of the improvement is notable. A 160-fold conductivity gain from a processing change alone, without altering the underlying chemical composition, is a result that is likely to accelerate work on MXene-based flexible electronics and high-frequency communication components, where conductivity loss has historically been a primary obstacle to practical use.
The paper, by D. Li et al., is published in Nature Synthesis (2026), DOI: 10.1038/s44160-025-00970-w.
What Comes Next
The HZDR and TU Dresden groups indicated that the ability to produce MXenes with halogen-controlled surface chemistry across multiple MAX phase compositions opens the door to systematic studies of how surface termination governs material properties. For application developers, the key question is whether the GLS process can be scaled up without losing the atomic-order advantage it demonstrates at laboratory scale.