Chinese Researchers Synthesize Metallic Carbon Nanoribbons

Xinhua News Agency reported that researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China synthesized metallic carbon nanoribbons composed entirely of five- and seven-membered rings via step-by-step surface synthesis. The team confirmed that these sub-nanometer-wide one-dimensional structures connected by covalent bonds achieve efficient electron transport, with the findings published online in the journal Nature on October 29. To achieve this, Professor Wang Bing, Professor Fan Qitang, and collaborators from the single-molecule team at the Hefei National Research Center for Physical Sciences at the Microscale selected relatively stable monomer molecules containing eight-membered carbon rings. On a silver surface, they connected them into chains and applied heat to convert the eight-membered rings into pairs of five-membered rings, producing previously difficult-to-prepare polypentalene chains. The researchers then continued heating the polypentalene chains, enabling adjacent chains to fuse laterally like zippers and generate seven-membered rings between them, which finalized the production of the five-seven ring carbon nanoribbons. This development established a synthetic route for metallic five-seven carbon nanoribbons and demonstrated efficient electron transport within a sub-nanometer carbon framework. The achievement turned theoretical concepts into a testable experimental system, provided a new material framework to study connections and metallicity, and holds promise for atomic-scale wires and interconnect units in future carbon-based chips.