Self-assembly and photoinduced fabrication of conductive nanographene wires on boron nitride

• Published in: Nature communications Vol. 13; no. 1; p. 442
• Main Authors: Zhang, Xiaoxi, Gärisch, Fabian, Chen, Zongping, Hu, Yunbin, Wang, Zishu, Wang, Yan, Xie, Liming, Chen, Jianing, Li, Juan, Barth, Johannes V., Narita, Akimitsu, List-Kratochvil, Emil, Müllen, Klaus, Palma, Carlos-Andres
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 21-01-2022; Nature Publishing Group; Nature Portfolio
• Subjects: 119/118; 140/133; 140/58; 147/135; 147/136; 147/138; 147/3; 639/301/357/341; 639/925/927; Annealing; Anthracene; Boron; Boron nitride; Carbon; Crosslinking; Fabrication; Graphene; Humanities and Social Sciences; Interfaces; Manufacturing; Materials engineering; Molecular structure; multidisciplinary; Nanomaterials; Nanotechnology; Nanotechnology devices; Nanowires; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Self-assembly; Silicones
• ISSN: 2041-1723; 2041-1723
• DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-27600-1

Manufacturing molecule-based functional elements directly at device interfaces is a frontier in bottom-up materials engineering. A longstanding challenge in the field is the covalent stabilization of pre-assembled molecular architectures to afford nanodevice components. Here, we employ the controlled supramolecular self-assembly of anthracene derivatives on a hexagonal boron nitride sheet, to generate nanographene wires through photo-crosslinking and thermal annealing. Specifically, we demonstrate µm-long nanowires with an average width of 200 nm, electrical conductivities of 10
6 
S m
−1
and breakdown current densities of 10
11 
A m
−2
. Joint experiments and simulations reveal that hierarchical self-assembly promotes their formation and functional properties. Our approach demonstrates the feasibility of combined bottom-up supramolecular templating and top-down manufacturing protocols for graphene nanomaterials and interconnects, towards integrated carbon nanodevices.
The bottom-up fabrication of structures with robust performance in the nm-to-μm scale usable for integrated carbon nanodevices is challenging. Here the authors report micrometer-long, highly conducting nanographene wires following self-assembly, photo-crosslinking and thermal annealing of anthracene derivatives on hexagonal boron nitride sheets.