Researchers have invented a brand-new synthesis method to make 2D materials called MXenes with rare earth elements for the first time (Nature 2026, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10802-2). The materials show a unique combination of properties—they are semiconducting and magnetic—which is valuable for next-generation energy-efficient electronics.
The feat is thrilling because it expands the MXene family and improves our understanding of the materials’ formation mechanism. “While they report a few new MXenes, they also provide the step-by-step reaction pathway, which could further help the field . . . explore new possibilities,” says Babak Anasori, a MXene expert at Purdue University who was not involved in the work. “We, the MXene community, now have more knobs to play with and explore a much larger portion of the periodic table.”
First discovered in 2011, MXenes are a family of materials containing several layers of metal and carbon or nitrogen atoms. There are boundless recipes for this layer cake. By tuning the elemental ingredients, numbers of layers, and the functional group toppings, researchers have made a range of MXenes with various properties, including high electrical conductivity and radiation shielding.
But the M in MXenes has always been a transition metal, making the materials conductive. Some researchers have predicted that rare earth metals would bestow MXenes with semiconducting properties. But rare earths have been difficult to incorporate into the 2D materials.
That’s because traditional MXene synthesis is top down: it involves etching precursor materials called MAX phases. “No such precursors contain rare earths,” says Qing Huang, a MXene researcher at the Yongjiang Laboratory. Also, “rare earths are very easy to oxidize,” he says. “If we use the traditional etching process, the rare earth will not stay in the product. It will be all oxidized.”
So Huang, Hongxin Yang of Zhejiang University, and colleagues invented a bottom-up route to make MXenes. They first mix and grind powders of copper halide and a rare earth metal, or lanthanide, and press the powder into pellets. Next, the researchers place the pellets with graphite in a furnace and heat the materials.
The copper halide and rare earth metal react to produce rare earth monohalides; these have a layered structure similar to MXenes, composed of layers of metal atoms and halogen atoms, Huang says. The carbon atoms from the graphite then “diffuse into the matrix between the rare earth atoms,” he says. “In that way, we avoid the oxidation process.”
The reactions result in rare earth MXenes with the chemical formula Ln2CT2, in which Ln is a lanthanide and T is chlorine or bromine. The materials have a bandgap similar to silicon, the iconic semiconductor used in electronics. And they are magnetic at low temperatures.
Magnetic semiconductors are key to future electronic and spintronic devices, which are being designed to harness an electron’s charge and spin to compute and store data faster than conventional semiconductors, using less energy. That’s not going to happen any time soon, of course, Huang says. “This is fundamental research. But it brings new thinking to these 2D materials.”
Yury Gogotsi, the Drexel University materials scientist who discovered MXenes, says that this work “takes research on 2D magnetic MXenes to a next level.” The new synthesis method could lead to many more novel and potentially important 2D materials. “This is just the beginning—a major step in synthesis of MXenes and exploration of their quantum properties,” Gogotsi says. “There are more lanthanide MXenes to make. It’s exciting.”
