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Long-range ordered porous carbons produced from C 60 .

Fei PanKun NiTao XuHuaican ChenYusong WangKe GongCai LiuXin LiMiao-Ling LinShengyuan LiXia WangWensheng YanWen YinPing-Heng TanLi-Tao SunDapeng YuRodney S RuoffYanwu Zhu
Published in: Nature (2023)
Carbon structures with covalent bonds connecting C 60 molecules have been reported 1-3 , 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 60 powder catalysed by α-Li 3 N at ambient pressure. LOPC consists of connected broken C 60 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-Li 3 N, a well-known polymerized C 60 crystal forms owing to the electron transfer from α-Li 3 N to C 60 . The carbon K-edge near-edge X-ray absorption fine structure shows a higher degree of delocalization of electrons in LOPC than in C 60 (s). The electrical conductivity is 1.17 × 10 -2  S cm -1 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 60 (s).
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