Hybrid Inorganic-Organic Visible-Light-Driven Microrobots Based on Donor-Acceptor Organic Polymer for Degradation of Toxic Psychoactive Substances.

Light-driven microrobots based on organic semiconductors have received tremendous attention in the past few years due to their unique properties, such as ease of reactivity tunability, band-gap modulation, and low cost. However, their fabrication with defined morphologies is a very challenging task that results in amorphous microrobots with poor motion efficiencies. Herein, we present hybrid inorganic-organic photoactive microrobots with a tubular shape and based on the combination of a mesoporous silica template with an active polymer containing thiophene and triazine units (named as microrobots).

Real-time optical and electronic sensing with a β-amino enone linked, triazine-containing 2D covalent organic framework.

Fully-aromatic, two-dimensional covalent organic frameworks (2D COFs) are hailed as candidates for electronic and optical devices, yet to-date few applications emerged that make genuine use of their rational, predictive design principles and permanent pore structure. Here, we present a 2D COF made up of chemoresistant β-amino enone bridges and Lewis-basic triazine moieties that exhibits a dramatic real-time response in the visible spectrum and an increase in bulk conductivity by two orders of magnitude to a chemical trigger - corrosive HCl vapours. The optical and electronic response is fully reversible using a chemical switch (NH vapours) or physical triggers (temperature or vacuum).

Tuning the Porosity and Photocatalytic Performance of Triazine-Based Graphdiyne Polymers through Polymorphism.

Crystalline and amorphous organic materials are an emergent class of heterogeneous photocatalysts for the generation of hydrogen from water, but a direct correlation between their structures and the resulting properties has not been achieved so far. To make a meaningful comparison between structurally different, yet chemically similar porous polymers, two porous polymorphs of a triazine-based graphdiyne (TzG) framework are synthesized by a simple, one-pot homocoupling polymerization reaction using as catalysts Cu for TzG and Pd /Cu for TzG . The polymers form through irreversible coupling reactions and give rise to a crystalline (TzG ) and an amorphous (TzG ) polymorph.

Exploring the "Goldilocks Zone" of Semiconducting Polymer Photocatalysts by Donor-Acceptor Interactions.

Water splitting using polymer photocatalysts is a key technology to a truly sustainable hydrogen-based energy economy. Synthetic chemists have intuitively tried to enhance photocatalytic activity by tuning the length of π-conjugated domains of their semiconducting polymers, but the increasing flexibility and hydrophobicity of ever-larger organic building blocks leads to adverse effects such as structural collapse and inaccessible catalytic sites. To reach the ideal optical band gap of about 2.

Tailored Band Gaps in Sulfur- and Nitrogen-Containing Porous Donor-Acceptor Polymers.

Donor-acceptor dyads hold the key to tuning of electrochemical properties and enhanced mobility of charge carriers, yet their incorporation into a heterogeneous polymer network proves difficulty owing to the fundamentally different chemistry of the donor and acceptor subunits. A family of sulfur- and nitrogen-containing porous polymers (SNPs) are obtained via Sonogashira-Hagihara cross-coupling and combine electron-withdrawing triazine (C N ) and electron-donating, sulfur-containing linkers. Choice of building blocks and synthetic conditions determines the optical band gap (from 1.