A landmark achievement by Chinese researchers in creating China's first two-dimensional metals has been named one of Physics World's "Top 10 Breakthroughs for 2025."

The work, led by a team at the Institute of Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was long considered nearly impossible and was published in the journal Nature in March.

Since the discovery of monolayer graphene in 2004, 2D materials have revolutionized people's understanding of materials and driven breakthroughs in condensed-matter physics and materials science. Over the past 20 years, the family of 2D materials has expanded rapidly, including hundreds of experimentally accessible 2D materials and nearly 2,000 theoretically predicted materials.

However, creating 2D metals has been extremely difficult due to the strong metallic bonds between atoms in all directions, said Zhang Guangyu, a leading scientist on the research team.

By developing an atomic-scale manufacturing method, the van der Waals squeezing method, the research team was able to create diverse 2D metals, including bismuth, tin, lead, indium and gallium.

"The thickness of these 2D metals is just one millionth of a piece of A4 paper and one 200,000th of the diameter of a human hair," Zhang said.

2D metals could propel the next stage of human civilization, bringing technological innovations in numerous fields, such as ultra-micro low-power transistors, high-frequency devices, transparent displays, ultra-sensitive detection and highly efficient catalysis, Zhang added.

Physics World is the flagship magazine and online publication of the Institute of Physics, the professional body and learned society for physics in the UK and Ireland.

Physics World's annual top 10 breakthroughs list is widely regarded as authoritative. To be selected, an achievement must demonstrate significant scientific importance, advance the frontiers of knowledge, tightly integrate theory and experiment, and attract broad attention from physicists worldwide.