Phosphorene: a new member of 2D family with multifaceted applications in material science.

Recently it was discovered that black phosphorus (BP), a bulk layered material, can be exfoliated either by Scotch tape method1 or by ultrasound activation in a medium with high dielectric constant2. The monolayer BP nanosheet, nicknamed phosphorene, which results from the exfoliation procedure, is a new 2D material endowed with peculiar characteristics, due to its puckered honeycomb structure, but unlike graphene, possesses intrinsic semiconductor properties. This opens the way to many important applications for high-performance electronic and optoelectronic devices3 which are summarised in the figure below. In this lecture, we'll focus on the preparation of phosphorene by liquid exfoliation and on the subsequent functionalization with transition metal nanoparticles. The nanohybrid constituted by nickel nanoparticles immobilized on BP sheets revealed an increased stability in ambient conditions in comparison to pristine phosphorene and was successfully applied in the catalytic hydrogenation of unsaturated substrates.