Project description
Building 3D carbon networks inspired by schwarzites
Over the past three decades, major progress has been made in developing zero-, one- and two-dimensional sp2-hybridised carbon materials. Yet their three-dimensional counterparts, known as schwarzite carbons or Mackay-Terrones crystals, remain unrealised despite their predicted electronic potential. With this in mind, the ERC-funded SCHWARZITE project aims to develop practical synthetic routes for these porous, crystalline carbon structures. Building on a new method for producing heptagon-containing polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), the team will design saddle-shaped nanostructures that self-assemble around fullerene templates. Using supramolecular binding studies and X-ray diffraction, researchers will create and characterise π-conjugated frameworks. This will pave the way for a new class of porous, conductive carbon materials.
Objective
Considerable progress has been made over the past thirty years in the synthesis and preparation of 0D, 1D, and 2D sp2-hybridized carbon materials, as well as for their smaller discrete nanosized polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) counterparts. However, 3D sp2-hybridized carbon networks, called schwarzite carbons or Mackay-Terrones crystals – first proposed in the early 1990s – remain elusive, despite exciting electronic properties and important applications being predicted for these porous crystalline all-carbon solids by theoreticians. Little activity has been devoted to this new class of carbon materials due to the enormous challenges foreseen for their synthesis. Even research towards 7- and 8-membered rings, whose saddle-shaped structures are the prerequisite for schwarzite-type molecular carbon materials, has only recently become a research focus for a still small number of chemists.
Based on an efficient synthetic method for heptagon-containing PAHs recently developed by our laboratory and the subsequent demonstration of the perfect schwarzite-like organization of four of such molecules around a C60-fullerene template, we herein propose rational strategies for both schwarzite-inspired saddle-shaped nanostructures as well as 3D schwarzite-like porous pi-conjugated solid-state materials. Thus, in this project, novel saddle-shaped PAHs bearing schwarzite-inspired sequences of hexagons and heptagons will be synthesized and self-assembled around fullerenes and other spherical template molecules, and characterized by supramolecular binding studies and single-crystal X-ray diffraction. Various synthetic approaches will be pursued for the post-functionalization of these complexes to afford pi-conjugated cage molecules and schwarzite-type pi-conjugated 3D materials. The functional properties of these novel materials will be explored with a broad repertoire of available techniques in our laboratory.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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(opens in new window) ERC-2024-ADG
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97070 Wuerzburg
Germany
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