Issue 8, 2015 - New pentagonal graphene structure discovered

Scientists in China, the United States and Japan have recently discovered a new structure of carbon - pentagonal graphene
.
This two-dimensional structure composed of carbon five-membered rings as structural primitives is expected to become a new carbon material, once prepared, some aspects of performance may surpass the conductor graphene, in electronics, biomedicine and nanotechnology and other fields have a wide range of application prospects
.
This discovery has attracted great attention
from the international scientific community.

Professor Wang Qian of the Center for Applied Physics and Technology of Peking University, Chen Xiaoshuang, a researcher at the Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and their American and Japanese collaborators have found through computational simulation that a quasi-two-dimensional metastable carbon structure can be formed using only a carbon five-membered ring, and its projection is similar to a decorative pattern called "Cairo pentagonal tile", and they named this new two-dimensional structure pentagonal graphene
.

Most of the carbon materials that have been discovered before are composed of carbon hexagonal rings as the main structural primitives, sometimes interconnected with pentagons, which are often considered topological defects, and carbon materials composed of only carbon five-element rings as structural primitives have not been found, and the new materials are completely two-dimensional pentagonal carbon allotropes
.
This discovery enriches the understanding of
carbon structure.
At present, this new type of carbon allotrope pentagonal graphene has been included
in "Wikipedia".

Molecular dynamics simulation shows that pentagonal graphene can withstand a high temperature of 727 °C and has ultra-high mechanical strength
comparable to graphene.
At the same time, pentagonal graphene also has a large inner band gap, which makes pentagonal graphene-based semiconductors easy to open and shut down, without the need to open the band gap through chemical or physical modification like graphene, which is also one of
the obstacles hindered by graphene in electronic device applications.
In addition, this pentagonal graphene can not only be rolled into semiconductor carbon nanotubes with five-membered carbon rings as structural motifs, but also stacked into a stable three-dimensional carbon block structure, and this three-dimensional carbon material has a larger band gap and a larger bulk elastic modulus than the carbon T12 phase
.

(Medium)