On-Surface Synthesis of Unsaturated Carbon Nanostructures with Regularly Fused Pentagon-Heptagon Pairs

Multiple fused pentagon-heptagon pairs are frequently found as defects at the grain boundaries of the hexagonal graphene lattice and are suggested to have a fundamental influence on graphene-related materials. However, the construction of sp(2) carbon skeletons with multiple regularly fused pentagon-heptagon pairs is challenging. In this work, we found that the pentagon-heptagon skeleton of azulene was rearranged during the thermal reaction of an azulene-incorporated organometallic polymer on Au(111). The resulting sp(2)-carbon frameworks were characterized by high-resolution scanning probe microscopy techniques and feature novel polycyclic architectures composed of multiple regularly fused pentagon-heptagon pairs. Moreover, the calculated analysis of its aromaticity revealed a peculiar polar electronic structure.