On-Surface Synthesis of C144 Hexagonal Coronoid with Zigzag Edges.

Coronoids as polycyclic aromatic macrocycles enclosing a cavity have attracted a lot of attention due to their distinctive molecular and electronic structures. They can be also regarded as nanoporous graphene molecules whose electronic properties are critically dependent on the size and topology of their outer and inner peripheries. However, because of their synthetic challenges, the extended hexagonal coronoids with zigzag outer edges have not been reported yet.

Elastic Properties of High-Symmetry SbO Cage-Molecular Crystal.

The cubic-phase antimony trioxide (α-SbO) is a room-temperature stable molecular crystal, composed of cage-like tetraantimony hexoxide (SbO) molecules. Despite its versatile functionality, the van der Waals (vdW) bond-dominated nanomechanics is still unclear. Here, the bending plate-like linear behaviors of high-quality α-SbO nanoflakes were observed using the nanoindentation method.

Inorganic Low Cage-molecular Crystals.

For the interlayer dielectric in microelectronics, light element compounds are preferably accepted due to less electronic polarization. Here, the nontrivial dielectric nature of the SbO cage-molecular crystal, known as α-antimony trioxide (α-SbO), is reported. The gas-phase synthesized α-SbO nanoflakes are of high crystal quality, from which the abnormal local admittance responses were revealed by scanning microwave impedance microscopy (sMIM).

On-Surface Synthesis of All-cis Standing Phenanthrene Polymers upon Selective C-H Bond Activation.

On-surface synthesis has emerged as a powerful approach to the atomically precise fabrication of molecular architectures with potential applications in nanotechnology. However, it is challenging to synthesize molecular structures that can protrude from the surface such as polymer chains forming by the molecules with upright conformations, since most of the on-surface reaction products, particularly the conjugated structures, prefer to adsorb parallel on the surface to maximize the molecule-substrate interaction. Here, we show an up-standing phenanthrene polymer chain with an all-cis configuration obtained by on-surface synthesis upon highly selective C-H activation.

Palladium-catalyzed hydroformylation of terminal arylacetylenes with glyoxylic acid.

A simple, practical and governable palladium-catalyzed hydroformylation of terminal arylacetylenes has been disclosed. The reaction proceeds under syngas-free conditions, using readily available glyoxylic acid as the formyl source, under mild conditions, giving rise to a broad range of α,β-unsaturated aldehydes.