[ps: The material in this chapter is completely imaginary and fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.]
"This is it!" Ni Guangnan pulled Huang He into a laboratory room. Huang He noticed that there were dozens of armed guards along the way, strictly guarding the entire passage. They even looked at Huang He with suspicion. If anything was amiss, Huang He feared he would be dead.
Moreover, these guards carried an innate aura of killing, as if they were all battle-hardened warriors.
"When did I recruit so many awesome security guards!" Huang He muttered to himself, then he saw what was preserved in this small room... a golden square metal piece protected by a transparent glass cover, about the size of a CD, pure golden in color, looking very valuable.
"What is this? What does it do?" Huang He asked curiously.
"This is a brand new material developed by my precious disciple. As for the name, it hasn't been decided yet. My precious disciple insists on giving you the right to name it, and won't even let me, which is outrageous!" Ni Guangnan said dejectedly, seemingly extremely frustrated about losing the naming rights for this metal disc.
"This looks like gold. Is it made of gold!" Huang He said, but he knew it was impossible. What kind of sense would it make to forge applied materials with gold? Wouldn't that be throwing money down the drain?
Unexpectedly, Ni Guangnan nodded and said, "However, it is indeed pure gold!"
"Damn! Who can afford this in the world!" Huang He's mouth widened. A piece of gold the size of a CD, not thin either, weighing at least several hundred grams. This single piece alone would cost over a hundred thousand yuan. Even if it had some incredible use, who could afford it?
"Cough, cough, actually, only the surface layer is pure gold. Its base is actually high-purity single-crystal silicon! So, this large piece actually only contains about 0.05 grams of gold. The actual material cost is about 20 yuan!" Ni Guangnan chuckled.
"You scared me to death!" Huang He touched his chest, then began to ponder his knowledge of gold, saying, "That's not right. According to you, if the outside is pure gold, then the elemental properties of pure gold have already been thoroughly researched by humans. How could any magical special material appear?"
"Indeed, precisely because of this, many scientists have not bothered to research the properties of gold, the most common and expensive metal. But your precious disciple is different!" Ni Guangnan licked his lips and was about to speak when the door to the room opened, and a young man walked in. Seeing Huang He, he exclaimed with surprise, "Boss, you're here!"
"Long time no see!" Huang He and Tong He embraced enthusiastically. Seeing Tong He's attitude towards Huang He, Ni Guangnan felt a bit jealous. But there was no way around it, as Tong He's current achievements were largely due to Huang He, who had discovered this super genius.
Although Ni Guangnan was his teacher, it was Huang He, not him, who had offered timely help.
"Tong He, tell your boss how you discovered this special material!" Ni Guangnan said with a smile.
"Actually, there's nothing special about it. I just repeated the experience of discovering graphene!" Tong He smiled honestly, scratching his head, and continued, "A few months ago, didn't you, boss, give me a pure gold medal?"
"Mmm!" Huang He nodded. This gold medal was actually a product of Huang He's guilt.
Because in this year, the Jiangnan server received global attention due to Tong He's research results on black gold, and the extremely powerful storage chips from Jiangnan also shocked the world. The Jiangnan Group also gained immense honor and profit.
However, for the sake of technological secrecy, Huang He could not reveal the credit for all this to Tong He. Therefore, Huang He had a ten-kilogram gold medal made and presented it to Tong He as his reward.
"At that time, my state was a bit bad. Although I had discovered many special properties of graphene and black gold, I couldn't seem to find any practical applications for them. The research of new materials had also reached a bottleneck, and I felt quite useless, unworthy of this ten-kilogram gold medal!" Tong He sighed, which made Ni Guangnan's veins bulge.
See, how Versailles-like were these words!
"So I wanted to rest for a while, go back to the beginning, and start from when I first found graphene, this special material, and try using tape to peel it off again to see if I could discover any new materials!" Tong He said.
"However, I stuck many materials, but the results were quite comical. Because not all materials have the special properties of graphite that can be peeled off layer by layer, most of the tape could only leave my fingerprints!"
"Just as I was about to give up, I suddenly remembered that when I was researching black gold before, I discovered that if black gold was ground into powder, then heated and mixed with some other special materials, it could form a highly viscous glue. This glue could even tear off a layer of metal atoms from the metal surface."
"So I thought, why not make tape with this glue, and then use this glue to stick to metals, to see if I could peel something off!"
"However, this glue could not peel anything off from overly hard metals; only metals that were relatively soft would work. Coincidentally, I had a large gold medal on hand, so I used this gold medal for the experiment. Using this black-gold-made tape, I peeled off various metals layer by layer from the surface of pure gold. Finally, I obtained a single-layer pure gold material. If named according to the naming convention of graphene, this should be called 'goldene.'"
"So, this single-crystal silicon surface is covered with goldene!" Huang He gasped. It seemed this goldene was incredibly powerful!
"No... If it were goldene, then this thing would still have the transparent color of single-crystal silicon, at most with a slightly transparent golden hue. Because goldene is too thin, it couldn't possibly dye the entire single-crystal silicon golden!" Tong He quickly explained.
"Cough, cough!" Huang He coughed a few times. "Then what is on the surface of this single-crystal silicon?"
"It's another allotrope of the gold element with a peculiar structure!" Tong He's eyes lit up. "After successfully manufacturing goldene, I studied its properties but found that it was basically no different from gold!"
"Just as I was feeling desperate, the teacher reminded me that perhaps there would be new discoveries on the tape!"
"No, I just reminded you not to focus solely on goldene and to look at other things. Perhaps there would be new discoveries. I didn't know this tape would be so magical!" Ni Guangnan quickly said, as he never claimed credit that wasn't his.
"No, this is all Teacher's credit. Without Teacher's reminder, I would have given up on goldene and researched other things!" Tong He said earnestly, which made Ni Guangnan show a look of great satisfaction.
"Continue!" Huang He urged.
"Mmm, after Teacher's reminder, I discovered that the used tapes had become somewhat strange. Originally, the black gold, after melting, adhered to the special tape paper and remained black. But after use, it turned pure golden!"
"So I scraped off the mixture of adhesive black gold and gold from the tape paper. When I collected them together, I found that this material had extremely high conductivity... But that's not important. More importantly, for insulation, our research table is actually a large piece of high-purity single-crystal silicon glass."
"And when I heated this mixed material, I found that its melting point was only 128.8 degrees. As soon as we heated it slightly, it dripped onto the surface of the single-crystal silicon!"
"Then, something that still seems incredibly magical happened!" Tong He said, licking his lips. "Once this mixed solution dripped onto the single-crystal silicon, it began to spread out extremely rapidly, as if intermolecular forces didn't exist!"
"As you know, under normal circumstances, a drop of liquid landing on a smooth surface will coalesce together, forming a raised point, at most spreading out slightly. The reason for this situation is the effect of intermolecular attraction."
"But in less than 2 seconds, this drop of molten liquid actually covered an area of single-crystal silicon the size of a palm, and then dyed the entire covered area golden!"
"Finally, we detected that this drop of liquid covered the surface of the single-crystal silicon in an almost perfect manner, being about one-tenth thinner than the surface obtained by gold plating, basically only tens of molecules thick!"
"What's even more magical is that only the gold adhered to the surface of the single-crystal silicon. The black gold liquid separated directly from the gold and could not adhere to the surface of the single-crystal silicon. With just a gentle wipe, all the black gold was removed, leaving only the gold layer attached to the surface of the single-crystal silicon!"
"Boss, you don't know how magical this situation is. It's like you mixed Coke and Sprite together, then heated them, and dripped a drop of the mixed liquid onto glass. After instant cooling, the Coke and Sprite magically separated. The Coke remained Coke, but the Sprite perfectly adhered to the glass surface, and then this glass became Sprite-flavored glass!"
"Then what's the use of this gold-flavored single-crystal silicon?" Huang He couldn't help but ask. This Tong He was too verbose and didn't get to the point.
"How should I put it?" Tong He scratched his head and then said, "Simply put, this gold-flavored single-crystal silicon has become a chip, and it's a naturally formed multi-layer structure with a precision equivalent to a 120 picometer lithography machine!"
"Uh... What is a picometer?" Huang He asked foolishly.
"Idiot..." Ni Guangnan glanced at Huang He disdainfully, then said, "1 meter equals 1 millimeter, 1 millimeter equals 1000 micrometers, 1 micrometer equals 1000 nanometers, and 1 nanometer equals 1000 picometers!"
"1 picometer is one-thousandth of a nanometer!" Ni Guangnan said.