Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, January 12, according to the release of University of Science and Technology of China, Professor Zhu Yanwu of University of Science and Technology of China constructed C60 polymer crystal and long-range ordered porous carbon crystal under atmospheric pressure by charge injection into fullerene C60 molecular crystal, and achieved its gram-scale preparation. On January 12th, the research results were published in the international academic journal Nature.

According to Zhu Yanwu, "the long-range ordered porous carbon crystals here are microscopically porous but completely retain the macroscopic periodicity of the crystals, so they are a new class of artificial carbon crystals. It may have potential applications in the fields of energy storage, ion sieving and supported catalysis in the future. The charge implantation technology provides a Lego preparation technology for the construction of this kind of carbon-based crystal materials, and is expected to become a new means to regulate the crystal structure at the atomic level. " "the results given in this paper are convincing and are of great significance to the fields of crystallography and material science," Nature said. "

Carbon is one of the most common elements in nature. Carbon atoms can form a variety of structures through different arrangements, such as graphite, diamond and amorphous carbon, which have been widely used in various fields.

Zhu Yanwu's team has been committed to developing large-scale preparation technology of new carbon materials for a long time. As early as 2011, Zhu Yanwu found a chemical "activation" way to "activate" graphene and successfully reconstructed the graphene sheet into a "living fossil graphene" with high specific surface area, high electrical conductivity and negative curvature structure. it shows excellent performance as a supercapacitor electrode material, and the research results have been published in Science.

CTOnews.com learned that in this study, Zhu Yanwu's team creatively used lithium nitride to implant charge into fullerene C60 molecular crystals and heat-treated them at mild temperatures, resulting in a large number of C60 polymer crystals and long-range ordered porous carbon crystals.

There are 60 carbon atoms in a C60 molecule. If you want to use it as a structural unit to get a new carbon structure, it is necessary to form a stable connection between the neighboring molecules, that is, part of the carbon atoms in a C60 molecule form a covalent bond with the carbon atoms in the neighboring molecules.

Ni Jie, co-lead author and special associate researcher of China University of Science and Technology, said, "We have theoretically simulated the formation mechanism of C60 polymer crystals and long-range ordered porous carbon crystals. The results show that the electric dipole moment interaction between fullerene C60 molecules is caused by charge injection, and the addition reaction barrier between adjacent C60 molecules is reduced, which makes the reaction easier. The further reaction makes the intermolecular connection part into a curved connection structure, but the partially broken fullerene C60 molecules still maintain a good periodic arrangement in the reaction process. "

It is worth noting that the team's structure search results based on machine learning and neural network potential functions further show that long-range ordered porous carbon-based crystals represent a large class of metastable crystal structures in the transition from fullerene molecular crystals to graphite carbon-like crystals.

Paper link

Https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05532-0

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