Electrical conductivity of goldene

As a noble metal, gold is known to possess ultrahigh conductivity and is therefore widely used as a conductor in a variety of integrated circuits. Recently, a two-dimensional (2D) material made of a single atomic layer of gold has been successfully produced, called goldene, after the name of graphene. This immediately raises an interesting question of whether goldene is an excellent conductor, comparable to its three-dimensional counterpart. In the present paper, by performing the first principles calculations on the conductivity of goldene arising from electron-phonon (eph) scattering, we find that such a 2D gold has a very high intrinsic conductivity at room temperature, which is in the same order of magnitudes as that of a lightly doped graphene and much larger than other 2D materials accessible so far. This result suggests that goldene, instead of its 3D bulk, is an excellent conductor in future electronic devices based on 2D materials, Then, we make a detailed analysis of the individual roles of the electronic structure and e-ph scattering strength in contributing to the intrinsic electric and thermal conductivity of goldene. Finally, we establish a simple deformational potential model to describe the e-ph interaction, which works very well to reproduce the numerical result of first-principles calculation of the intrinsic conductivity of goldene.