The excess of surface dangling bonds makes the formation of free-standing two-dimensional (2D) metals unstable and hence difficult to achieve. To date, only a few reports have demonstrated 2D metal formation over substrates. Here, we show a free-standing crystalline single-atom-thick layer of iron (Fe) using in situ low-voltage aberration-corrected transmission electron microscopy and supporting image simulations. First-principles calculations confirm enhanced magnetic properties for single-atom-thick 2D Fe membranes. This work could pave the way for new 2D structures to be formed in graphene membranes.

Grain boundaries in monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides have unique atomic defect structures and band dispersion relations that depend on the inter-domain misorientation angle. Here, we explore misorientation angle-dependent electrical transport at grain boundaries in monolayer MoS2 by correlating the atomic defect structures of measured devices analysed with transmission electron microscopy and first-principles calculations. Transmission electron microscopy indicates that grain boundaries are primarily composed of 5–7 dislocation cores with periodicity and additional complex defects formed at high angles, obeying the classical low-angle theory for angles <22°. The inter-domain mobility is minimized for angles <9° and increases nonlinearly by two orders of magnitude before saturating at ∼16 cm2 V−1 s−1 around misorientation angle≈20°. This trend is explained via grain-boundary electrostatic barriers estimated from density functional calculations and experimental tunnelling barrier heights, which are ≈0.5 eV at low angles and ≈0.15 eV at high angles (≥20°).

Significance The single metal atom has been proposed to be a catalyst during the growth of carbon nanotubes; however, this hypothesis is still not confirmed. Our direct in situ transmission EM observation of the restructuring of the graphene edges interacting with an Fe atom directly revealed the intermediate states: pentagon and hexagon structures. In particular, our experiments and simulations show that the single Fe atom behaves differently on the graphene zigzag and armchair edges, giving insights to the growth mechanisms of various sp 2 carbon structures.

Clusterfullerenes are capable of entrapping a variety of metal clusters within carbon cage, for which the entrapped metal cluster generally keeps its geometric structure (e.g., bond distance and angle) upon changing the isomeric structure of fullerene cage, and whether the properties of the entrapped metal cluster is geometry-dependent remains unclear. Herein we report an unusual triangular monometallic cluster entrapped in fullerene cage by isolating several novel terbium cyanide clusterfullerenes (TbNC@C) with different cage isomeric structures. Upon varying the isomeric structure of C cage from C(5) to C(6) and to C(9), the entrapped triangular TbNC cluster exhibits significant distortions as evidenced by the changes of Tb-C(N) and C-N bond distances and variation of the Tb-C(N)-N(C) angle by up to 20°, revealing that the geometric structure of the entrapped triangular TbNC cluster is variable. All three TbNC@C molecules are found to be single-ion magnets, and the change of the geometric structure of TbNC cluster directly leads to the alternation of the magnetic relaxation time of the corresponding TbNC@C clusterfullerene.

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