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Materials science

Organic analogues of graphene

Nature volume 542, pages 423–424 (2017)Cite this article

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Chemists have long aspired to synthesize two-dimensional polymers that are fully conjugated — an attribute that imparts potentially useful properties. Just such a material has been prepared using a solid-state polymerization reaction.

One of the greatest breakthroughs in materials science was the isolation of graphene1 — a two-dimensional carbon crystal, obtained by stripping off (exfoliating) a single layer of atoms from graphite using adhesive tape. This discovery prompted the emergence of 2D materials as a new paradigm in science and technology. Nevertheless, graphene's potential use as a semiconductor in electronic devices has been limited because its bandgap (a property that controls the conductivity of materials) is zero, which enforces metal-like conduction. This problem has stimulated growing interest in synthesizing organic analogues of graphene that might exhibit useful properties, including a tunable bandgap2,3. Writing in Nature Chemistry, Liu et al.4 report a breakthrough in this field: the synthesis of an organic graphene analogue known as a 2D-conjugated aromatic polymer (2D-CAP).

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Figure 1: Synthesis of a two-dimensional conjugated aromatic polymer.

M. Ebrahimi & F. Rosei

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Maryam Ebrahimi and Federico Rosei are at the Institute of Fundamental and Frontier Science, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 610051, China, and at the Centre for Energy, Materials and Telecommunications of INRS, Varennes, Quebec J3X 1S2, Canada.,

    Maryam Ebrahimi & Federico Rosei

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  1. Maryam Ebrahimi
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  2. Federico Rosei
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Correspondence to Maryam Ebrahimi or Federico Rosei.

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Ebrahimi, M., Rosei, F. Organic analogues of graphene. Nature 542, 423–424 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature21503

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