Germanium takes holey orders

Soap-like molecules serve as a scaffold for remarkably well-ordered, porous germanium skeletons. The nanometre-sized features of these semiconductor frameworks confer unique optical and electronic properties. ‘Porous’ silicon was hailed as an exciting new material for microelectronics when it was first produced 15 years ago. It provided an alternative range of properties to complement those of crystalline silicon. Now germanium, another element important in microelectronics, has come under scrutiny, and two groups report the use of a technique called surfactant templating to synthesize germanium with ordered pores: one group obtains cubic, and the other, hexagonal geometry. Initial investigations show that, as with porous silicon, these materials also have differing properties to their bulk counterparts.