New form of carbon in a mesh tantalizes with prospects for electronics

Nanowerk August 27, 2021 Biphenylene network is highly conductive and may prove able to store more electrical energy than even graphene. However, their syntheses remain challenging given the lack of reliable protocols for generating nonhexagonal rings during the in-plane tiling of carbon atoms. An international team of researchers (Germany, Finland, Japan) has grown an ultraflat biphenylene network with periodically arranged four-, six-, and eight-membered rings of sp2-hybridized carbon atoms through an on-surface interpolymer dehydrofluorination (HF-zipping) reaction. The characterization of this biphenylene network by scanning probe methods reveals that it is metallic rather than a dielectric. They expect the interpolymer HF-zipping […]