Scientists of the Technion, a leading Israeli university specializing in technical sciences, for the first time in the history of science managed to create artificial gold in the form of a porous single crystal of the precious metal.

The breakthrough was made by Maria Koifman-Christosof, a graduate student of the Faculty of Materials Engineering under the supervision of Professor Boaz Pokroy. They published an article about their achievement in the journal Nature Communications.

"We were motivated to invent this new technology solely by scientific interest. But, of course, this material has a lot of potential areas of use," Koifman-Christosof assured.

Single crystals have several advantages over polycrystals due to the continuous crystal lattice in their structure, which provides such materials with mechanical strength, resistance to high temperatures, and increased thermal and electrical conductivity.