| By Mary Page Bailey
Thin gold films offer a broad range of benefits for electronics due to their high electrical conductivity and transparency. Current manufacturing methods are unable to achieve gold films thinner than 10 nm, and are also limited in the area and continuity of films they can produce, due to the formation of “metal islands” — clusters of atoms on the substrate that can hinder conductivity, mechanical stability and substrate coverage. A new high-vacuum deposition process that takes inspiration from the chemical vapor deposition of graphene, developed in a collaboration between Xpanceo (Dubai, U.A.E.; www.xpanceo.com) and professor Konstantin S. Novoselov from the University of Manchester (U.K.;