Layered matter that maintains spacing but loses stacking order

Abstract: In layered materials, spacing and stacking-order extent are usually locked. Here we show that in swollen suspensions of stiff, charged nanosheets they decouple, and that this defines a distinct regime, apart from the crystalline- and Wigner-swelling regimes such systems usually occupy. The mean spacing stays sharp and salinity-tunable while scattering-weighted stacking spans only two to three layers. We demonstrate this in a near-perfect model material, so the behaviour is intrinsic, not defect-driven. X-ray and neutron scattering, sedimentation and a Donnan analysis show the spacing is held by a parameter-free osmotic restoring slope below one pascal per nanometre. Because the slope is so weak, the spacing sits at equilibrium while faults relax slowly, a quenched metastable registry whose ageing-like relaxation of low-dimensional periodic order has not, to our knowledge, been realised before. The same decoupling is expected across stiff, swollen nanosheets, from clays to oxide nanosheets and graphene oxide.