Research reinvents MXene synthesis

MXenes (pronounced like the name “Maxine”) are a class of two-dimensional materials, first identified just 14 years ago, with remarkable potential for energy storage, catalysts, ultrastrong lightweight composites, and a variety of other purposes ranging from electromagnetic shielding to ink that can carry a current.

But manufacturing MXenes has been expensive, difficult and crude. 

“MXenes have been made by a very elaborate, multi-step process that involved days of high-temperature work, followed by using dangerous chemicals like hydrofluoric acid and created a lot of waste,” said Prof. Dmitri Talapin of the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) and Department of Chemistry. “That may have been okay for early-stage research and lab exploration, but became a big roadblock for taking the next step to large-scale applications.”

Talapin led a team of researchers from UChicago, University of Illinois Chicago and Vanderbilt University who developed a new technique for synthesizing the two-dimensional MXenes atom-by-atom from the bottom up.

The work, enabled by the NSF Center for Chemical Innovation on MXenes Synthesis, Tunability and Reactivity (M-STAR) and recently published in Nature Synthesis, used chemical vapor deposition to create MXenes that are “at least two orders of magnitude” less expensive than MXenes synthesized by traditional methods, said Talapin, the UChicago Ernest DeWitt Burton Distinguished Service Professor.

“What's exciting about this paper is it's a new way of doing chemical synthesis, using a new set of organic precursors, that allows us to achieve these 2D materials more efficiently,” said co-author Prof. De-en Jiang, the H. Eugene McBrayer Professor of Chemical Engineering at Vanderbilt University.

The new method of making this futuristic material was inspired by an obscure paper from a chemistry legend, published in 1986.

“We came across a forgotten paper by the great John Corbett at Iowa State University that very few people knew about and that showed the chemistry that we found inspirational for the development of our ideas,” Talapin said.

Corbett’s paper described a method of synthesizing layered zirconium chloride carbide, which is structurally similar to a different material first described 25 years later—MXene. 

‘Carving a book’

Created by Drexel University researchers in 2011, MXenes are layers of transition metals carved so atomically thin they’re best described as two-dimensional. Researchers around the world are turning to them for energy storage, industrial catalysts, electromagnetic interference shielding, optoelectronics and other new frontiers.

“MXenes are widely explored, particularly for energy-storage applications, because they consist of conductive two-dimensional layers that can host ions between them,” said co-author Noah Mason, a PhD student and NSF Graduate Research Fellow in Talapin’s lab. “They also have tunable surface groups, which can be chemically tailored to control which ions are stored, how favorable that storage is, and how efficiently ions flow into and out of the layers.”

The materials are remarkable, but the current method for manufacturing them is expensive and difficult. Researchers take powders or other materials and etch out their innards with hydrogen fluoride, molten salts or other caustic chemicals and rearrange what’s left into a 2D layer of atoms. 

“It’s like trying to carve a book out of a block of wood,” said co-author Prof. Robert Klie, the head of the University of Illinois Chicago Physics Department. “Our new method builds that book the way it should be made—page by page.”

‘The secret behind the synthesis’

Adapting the synthesis techniques outlined in Corbett’s paper from metals like zirconium to the titanium found in the most common MXenes led to a paper in Science in 2023, but there were still several hurdles before the technique was ready for wide adoption.

“In the 2023 paper, we didn't show a very high yield or purity of the MXenes in our final product,” said Di Wang, the first author of both the 2023 and 2025 papers. “We could not make it higher than 60 weight percent. In this paper, we achieved 90 weight percent. We not only discovered a new reaction, but started to learn about the secret behind the synthesis.”

Safety and cost were also concerns, said Wang, who was a UChicago PhD student in Talapin’s lab during the research and is now a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University. For one example, the precursor chemical used in that earlier work—titanium tetrachloride—is so reactive that researcher Wang remembers it etching the plastic pipette syringes as he tried to use them. The new work uses tetrachloroethylene, a chemical so inexpensive and stable it's commonly used to extract caffeine from the coffee beans for decaf drinks. 

Talapin said research adapting Corbett’s work four decades later shows the value of pure exploratory research—science for science’s sake, leaving the results for future scientists to find practical applications. 

The M-STAR team is well-positioned to help, said Jiang. The consortium lets chemists use traditional inorganic chemistry, nanosynthesis, catalysis, or other novel, interdisciplinary approaches, coupled with computational modeling and simulations, to “attack problems from different angles,” he said.

“The M-STAR CCI is pioneering an approach where the chemist is front and center,” Jiang said. “They're going to be using MXenes as a platform to drive innovation in chemistry by working together with materials scientists, physicists, and chemical engineers in the team.”

Citation: "Molecular organohalides as general precursors for direct synthesis of two-dimensional transition metal carbide MXenes," Wang et al, Nature Synthesis, December 3, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s44160-025-00946-w