Bottom-up Synthesis of Nitrogen-Doped Porous Graphene Nanoribbons
Rémy Pawlak, Xunshan Liu, Silviya Ninova, Philipp D’Astolfo, Carl Drechsel, Sara Sangtarash, Robert Häner, Silvio Decurtins, Hatef Sadeghi, Colin J. Lambert, Ulrich Aschauer, Shi‐Xia Liu, Ernst Meyer
Abstract
Although methods for a periodic perforation and heteroatom doping of graphene sheets have been developed, patterning closely spaced holes on the nanoscale in graphene nanoribbons is still a challenging task. In this work, nitrogen-doped porous graphene nanoribbons (N-GNRs) were synthesized on Ag(111) using a silver-assisted Ullmann polymerization of brominated tetrabenzophenazine. Insights into the hierarchical reaction pathways from single molecules toward the formation of one-dimensional organometallic complexes and N-GNRs are gained by a combination of scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), atomic force microscopy (AFM) with CO-tip, scanning tunneling spectroscopy (STS), and density functional theory (DFT).