Long-range ordered porous carbons produced from C.

Carbon structures with covalent bonds connecting C molecules have been reported, but their production methods typically result in very small amounts of sample, which restrict the detailed characterization and exploration necessary for potential applications. We report the gram-scale preparation of a new type of carbon, long-range ordered porous carbon (LOPC), from C powder catalysed by α-LiN at ambient pressure. LOPC consists of connected broken C cages that maintain long-range periodicity, and has been characterized by X-ray diffraction, Raman spectroscopy, magic-angle spinning solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, aberration-corrected transmission electron microscopy and neutron scattering. Numerical simulations based on a neural network show that LOPC is a metastable structure produced during the transformation from fullerene-type to graphene-type carbons. At a lower temperature, shorter annealing time or by using less α-LiN, a well-known polymerized C crystal forms owing to the electron transfer from α-LiN to C. The carbon K-edge near-edge X-ray absorption fine structure shows a higher degree of delocalization of electrons in LOPC than in C(s). The electrical conductivity is 1.17 × 10 S cm at room temperature, and conduction at T < 30  K appears to result from a combination of metallic-like transport over short distances punctuated by carrier hopping. The preparation of LOPC enables the discovery of other crystalline carbons starting from C(s).