A new route to semiconducting nanoribbons

Synthesis of porphyrin-fused graphene nanoribbons. (From Nature Chemistry article.)

• A team of scientists from Oxford (Departments of Chemistry and Materials), Mainz (Germany), Waterloo (Canada) and Nottingham (UK) has demonstrated the synthesis of graphene nanoribbons containing porphyrin units which exhibit high charge carrier mobilities.
• This synthesis produces soluble porphyrin-fused graphene nanoribbons with an average length of about 85 nm (34 repeat units).
• Terahertz spectroscopy reveals that the nanoribbons have a high charge mobility (>400 cm² V^–1 s^–1). They can be integrated into devices to produce ambipolar field-effect and single-electron transistors with excellent switching behaviour.

This work opens a route to porphyrin-fused graphene nanoribbons with engineerable optical, electrical and magnetic properties, as porphyrins form complexes with almost every metal in the periodic table.

You can read more about this study in Nature Chemistry: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41557-024-01477-1