Bottom-up Synthesis of Nitrogen-doped Porous Graphene Nanoribbons

Pawlak, Rémy and Liu, Xunshan and Ninova, Silviya and d'Astolfo, Philipp and Drechsel, Carl and Sangtarash, Sara and Häner, Robert and Decurtins, Silvio and Sadeghi, Hatef and Lambert, Colin J. and Aschauer, Ulrich and Liu, Shi Xia and Meyer, Ernst (2020) Bottom-up Synthesis of Nitrogen-doped Porous Graphene Nanoribbons. Journal of the American Chemical Society, 142 (29). pp. 12568-12573. ISSN 0002-7863

Abstract

Although methods for a periodic perforation and heteroatom doping of graphene sheets have been developed, patterning closely spaced holes on the nanoscale in graphene nanoribbons is still a challenging task. In this work, nitrogen-doped porous graphene nanoribbons (N-GNRs) were synthesized on Ag(111) using a silver-assisted Ullmann polymerization of brominated tetrabenzophenazine. Insights into the hierarchical reaction pathways from single molecules towards the formation of one-dimensional organometallic complexes and N-GNRs are gained by a combination of scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), atomic force microscopy (AFM) with CO-tip, scanning tunneling spectroscopy (STS) and density functional theory (DFT).