Chinese scientists create a new type of carbon material

Fullerene, carbon nanotubes, graphene, graphyne... Carbon materials have always been considered as a material of the future, and the discovery of each new carbon material has triggered a wave of research by materials scientists. Today, the carbon family has added a new member - the team of Zheng Jian, a researcher at the Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has spent ten years honing their skills and created a new type of carbon allotrope single crystal "single-layer polymerized C60" under simple reaction conditions at normal pressure. It has high crystallinity and good thermodynamic stability, providing a new idea for the research of carbon materials.

This result was published in the international academic journal Nature on the 16th, attracting widespread attention from the international chemistry and materials science communities.

Substances composed of the same element show different physical and chemical properties due to different atomic arrangements, which we call allotropes. Soft graphite, hard diamond, etc. are allotropes of carbon, and they have their own important applications. But these materials exist in nature. Scientists have been looking for a long time, is it possible to "build" new materials with carbon atoms, and "customize" the new carbon materials we need.

"For the preparation of pure carbon materials, the idea in the past has always been to use carbon atoms as the basic unit to build." Zheng Jian explained that he led the team to creatively use C60 molecules to replace carbon atoms as the basic unit. Under mild conditions of room temperature and pressure, the C60 molecules were polymerized by doping with metallic magnesium, and then the metallic magnesium was removed through an organic cation slicing strategy to finally obtain a single-layer polymerized C60. This is a new clustered two-dimensional superstructure, in which C60 clusters are caged on a plane and covalently bonded to each other through CC bonds to form a regular topological structure. "It took us five years to get this stable structure." Zheng Jian said that there are a total of 60 carbon atoms in a C60 molecule. In order to obtain a stable structure, the carbon atoms in adjacent molecules must form a stable connection. Dr. Hou Lingxiang, the first author of the paper and a member of Zheng Jian's team, said: "There are too many possibilities, but there is only one correct path. Otherwise, the C60 molecules will not be connected according to the designed rules, and it is difficult to measure its size and properties. We tried many methods, prepared many samples, and took many detours." The dedicated research finally paid off: multiple characterization measurement results showed that this new material is the target material that Zheng Jian's team wanted to obtain, and they have pioneered a new method for preparing carbon materials.

At the same time, the measurement results also found that this new material is a typical semiconductor and has good thermodynamic stability. It is still stable at about 326.85℃. Zheng Jian said: "We believe that this new material has important application prospects in nonlinear optics and functional electronic devices, and also has potential applications in superconductivity, quantum computing, spin transport, information and energy storage, catalysis and other fields." Next, the team will conduct in-depth research on the characteristics of this new material to explore more application scenarios and greater application value.